Profile and Blog Updates

To follow or not

2012-01-28T02:19:00.003+08:00

I've my various reasons for following, not following, or stopped following (replace "following" with "to circles" or "friended" where applicable). As much as I like to follow you back, I don't want my timeline to be filled with junk too. What is listed here mostly applies to twitter.

Reasons for following:

You are already being followed by several people I'm already following and possibly receiving mentions from the said person regularly
Your tweets are interesting
Out of curisosity

Reasons for not following:

Tweets are mostly in a language that I don't understand
Too much links, including "I favourited a Youtube video" or "MyAnimeList updated".
Protected account, so I don't know what you are tweeting about (protected accounts you see in my following list were not protected at the time I followed them)
Not interested / Never seen you before
Too many retweets
Boring tweets
Ugly profile and/or display image (if viewing via the PC web version at that time)
Has a #teamfollowback hashtag somewhere
Number of followers is more than several thousand
(For accounts of well-known people) Not from a personal point of view
Adopting a wait-and-see approach if not having the same interest or not having anyone I'm following following them too.

Reasons for unfollowing:

Tweet too frequently and clogging up my timeline, especially when I'm following a lot of people.
Became uninterested. "Protected" accounts are not excluded.
Spamming my timeline with rubbish at the time I saw you doing it. This includes replies to those that we both follow.
Thanking all followers individually for following and not placing the username first. One right after the other for countless times. (Example)
Not on good terms (They usually unfollow me first.)
Tweets too infrequently (eg. 5 tweets a month), or the last one was a long time ago
Changes to a display image (and maybe display name too) to something I find disturbing

Reasons for blocking:

Obvious spammer (and gets reported too)
Corporate accounts following me based on what I said recently
Accidentally did so

New twitter layout

2011-12-15T19:00:00.001+08:00

Twitter has introduced a new layout which seems to makes use of space better. Well, having the timeline to be on the right instead of the left itself could get becoming something to get used to over time. This could affect how I do things.

Why is this the transition more smoothly than during the previous transition in... was it in 2010? I think there was an overall with the code, like being able to view images without opening a new page or what tweet is being replied to. The current new one just needed repositioning of things.

Anime blog: change of layout

2011-10-01T10:12:00.001+08:00

I'm about to start changing the layout of the anime blog. It currently has too much pink, and the width of the post is kind of narrow. If posting an image as large as the one seen above, the side would be squished.

I'm aware of it for quite a while, but the Twitter and Facebook buttons at the side doesn't work properly, especially the latter.

Background image is to be removed, but I'm compensating it with images at the header, and ones in the posts.

It's been there for a while but...

2011-09-16T05:39:00.001+08:00

It's been there for a while, but did anyone notice the translator badge on my profile? No one commented about it.

Rejected version of "Alternate Dimension (Part 76)"

2011-09-02T21:43:00.000+08:00

This was rejected because it doesn't seem right, and I wanted the 6^th Story to be independent from the other stories.

I'm kind of curious what Isaka's son is like, because his situation feels almost similar to Itsuki when he enters Mizuho for the first time so...

Itsuki: "Hey Saeko. Something interesting happened. A colleague's friend, who is a teacher of a high school not far from Kamisugi High, told me that a male student approached him saying that he lost his student ID, but found a girl's student ID of the same school during an event at Mizuho. What is strange about that ID he found is that, everything except the photo contains exactly the same information as the student who found it, and some mysterious force made the teacher say that the ID is his, despite the photo on it being obviously a girl. The name of the student in question was a second year called Isaka Tsukasa."

...so just as I was thinking about the person in question, Itsuki came in to talk about someone. Wait... That student's family name is also Isaka, and people think the girl in the photo is him... The Isaka woman who worked with me said she found a female uniform in her son's closet that has his own name instead of her daugher's sewn onto it. I have a strong feeing that the student Itsuki was talking about, and the son of the Isaka who worked for me as a supervisor, are of the same person.

Me: "So, exactly what are you planning? Just so you know, that student's mother happens to work for me in a senior position."

Itsuki: "Well..."

It seems that my mention of knowing the mother made him rethink about what he originally wanted to say.

Itsuki: "What about letting him buy whatever he likes with our money? Our combined income keeps coming in a lot quicker than we can spend them, even after including spending on the most expensive things money could buy."

"Where's story 5?"

2011-06-16T01:43:00.000+08:00

The rough idea of writing a 6th blog story is starting to come inside my head. When I do publish it, people may ask if I've skipped a number as, if you look at the navigation menu, there's currently only no.1-4 listed, with the fifth entry listed as no.6 and might ask what happened to no.5.

Well, there is a 5th story, but I'm just publishing it for a friend who asked me to put it up on my blog on their behalf. Since then, there has been no new parts written for it and I don't know what that friend is up to. In other words, it got abandoned as soon as it got published, and I'm already busy writing for story 2 and 3.

So what exactly will the sixth story be about? Well, it's based on an idea of the manga I read a few hours ago. Initial plans includes an another person's point of view of Mizuho Girls' Academy, which the most recent parts of the second story is taking place in, but that doesn't really allow me to tell much about what the place.is like from a normal person's point of view. Hopefully with minimal interaction with the main characters of the older stories.

Mentally stressed now

2011-05-10T13:50:00.000+08:00

Why why why? What's with the requirements being a complicated process and requiring things that I don't have or hard to get? Also, why do they use difficult words to describe it too? Too bad it's not like games where you can't restart/undo things, or have something to guide me.

Can't I just know and do what I want, get paid a lot, find a spouse, a nice place to live in, and be happy?

Backgound image changes

2011-04-28T16:03:00.000+08:00

The background of my main blog in English has changed to an image taken in Ikenohata, Taito-ku in Tokyo, which was the same image previously used on my Twitter profile. This has yet to be applied to the Japanese version.

What I went through while Writing "Alternate Dimension" Part 67 & 68

2011-04-12T15:02:00.000+08:00

Writing....
Thinking of what write while staring at "Footsteps of someone wearing high heels were heard, followed by the sound of the front door being unlocked."
Had an idea
Midway through writing, my body wanted to touch itself for some odd reason
didn't want to, but the urge made me unable to think straight
couldn't stop myself and it got more intense
I felt something liquid came out of me
it stopped and I regain consciousness, but drained my energy to resume writing and breathing heavily as though I had been running
fell asleep
woke up and went out of the house
arrived back
didn't felt like writing for some time
continued writing. Moved the latter part of part 67 to part 68.
Published part 67
Wrote some of part 68
Got distracted and wrote the end review of winter anime
got distracted again an wrote part 1 of the spring preview
Published "Spring 2011 Anime Preview Part 1"
Had work on the most of Friday
Published "End-Winter 2011 Anime Review"
Made a new avatar for Twitter
Wrote and published "Spring 2011 Anime Preview Part 2"
Went to a museum the whole afternoon
Reached home and continued writing Part 68
No.4-8 happened again while writing (I find it irritating)
Decided that the part after the "End of a chapter" text aligned to the center in Part 68 be moved into Part 69
Published Part 68, finally. Almost 2 weeks after no.13

Thinking of changing Twitter avatar

2011-03-01T23:30:00.000+08:00

I'm thinking of changing my current avatar as it has been in use for quite some months now, but I haven't figured out what that would be. That would at least be around December since I remembered making a santa version of it around christmas, but didn't actually use it.

The avatar is a crop of a vector I did recently at around the head. Perhaps an uncropped version?

(Looks at this blogs' posts) Wait, It's been 3 months since I last posted something here?

End of the year things

2010-12-20T12:06:00.001+08:00

I am writing this right after publishing S2P64 on the main blog, so to let you know I'm not dead in case you didn't follow me on Twitter and noticed that I've never post or update my blog after a long time. Also, I know I've not been updating the anime watch list widget: it a pain to manually update it by looking through all the code and multiply that by 4 every week.

So, to tell you the truth, I have been playing video games a lot that I've never gotten to play during the rest of the year. The Final Fantasy 13 (PS3) game I bought is last played at some large plans I can't seem to get pass due to strong monsters. That was on first try and never played a new session. Then there are these games from 2004 too that I'm playing on the PC at the same time. I've too tried to install Fallout 3 for the PC, but I've never gone any further than the "New Game" option, when it crashed. This means I've never gotten to actually to play the game. I know there's a PS3 version, but I don't know if it's in stock now and don't want to bring out extra money.

Speaking of extra money, the TV the PS3 is connected to seems to be faulty as the colours have gone all crazy. I don't know where the problem is as anything on the TV itself seems normal, but all the inputs (Composite, Component, SCART, VGA, HDMI, S-Video, RF) are rendered strangely. There's another TV in the house, but that is a CRT letterbox that only has Composite and RF inputs. Refer to the right image if you don't know about this problem: it's not edited at all.

After publishing this post, I'm thinking of writing of the end-year/Autumn summary on the anime blog I promised. I've just watched OreImo 12.

Minor Change to the Stories Navigation Menu

2010-11-07T12:36:00.000+08:00

At the bottom of each of my posts on the main blog with the "story" tag, I have been using the following format for quite some time.

← Part 59

Part 61 →

However, when I click between "Edit HTML" and "Compose" modes at blogger, this formatting seems to have been lost. Also, for services that extract my posts (including Wordpress' post, and Facebook's RSS importers), I noticed that the formatting did not appear as I wanted. To save me the effort of having to type the code again each time this happens (yes, I type the code manually), I'm going to simplify to just links at the bottom that is separated with only spaces and a "|" aligned to the center. It looks like this:

Part 59 | Part 61

I will be applying to this code when editing earlier parts that would cause the above to happen since there are too many to edit. If you search deep enough you might come across the version before the previous where the link for the previous part is at the very top.

New Positioning of the Post Date

2010-07-31T23:31:00.000+08:00

I've repositioned the date to the left of the post as a separate area on the English version of the anime blog. In addition to that, I've managed to create a data area below the date that is unique to that post containing the name of the person who posted it and (at time of post) current Twitter icons with a direct link to it.

This post from more than a year ago was chosen as Yukari has not posted in a while and to show that the code is working as the large majority of the posts there are by me. In addition, I've added a small code to have those share icons (that gray row of icons at the top middle of the image) to appear on both the anime and main blogs. I obtained this code from changing the layout theme of the layout test blog to one of the new presets.

Insufficient Time to keep up

2010-07-04T01:47:00.000+08:00

So, with whatever I'm doing now having little time between reaching home and heading to bed for the following day (weekend is for catch-up), I do not have the time to do much.

As you know, I have a lot of blogs dedicated to certain things, like drawings, technology, and so on, including separate Japanese versions. I do not have as much time now as the time I made those.

With my stories first appearing less than a week after my birthday in 2008 (it wasn't planned), it seems that I am doing it full time with thousands of words for each part in recent time, though I wasn't aware of it until I looked at the word count. Just to let you know, I have no plans to publish it in print, and neither am I paid to write. People I've met did tell me to do so or asked what it's about. As the author, I can't really answer what my story is about as I'm not really sure myself and no clear planning was done. Also, the amount I made from the guguru ads in a month is not even enough to buy a thing at a 100-yen shop or drinks from the vending machine. Also, for the jlist ads, nobody seems to be buying anything via the ads on my blog, so there's absolutely nothing on that one.

Incoming traffic into the blog has been increasing since my twitter account itself became popular, and strangely enough, image search engines that had text containing those of my earlier post. Remember though, I am only one person and I can't be doing everything by myself. I also need a life and can't be spending my non working/sleeping time at my blog all the time. I need to head out with friends, visit relatives, playing video games (especially that recently bought PS3), doing whatever my parents tell me to do, and so on.

Story 4 is hard to write as it needs actual planning, but when I try to, ideas for Story 2/3 came to mind instead. A close friend of mine gave me ideas for the 5th story, but I don't really feel like writing that. Not with the backlog I have now.

(Follow me on twitter (@takhsiru) for minor updates I might say, or wonder what I'm up to.)

Stories Navigation Menu and Shortening Links

2010-06-03T03:29:00.000+08:00

With me wiring my original stories (not to be confused with the name of the 1^st story) that are now numbered into the hundreds, tags are not sufficient enough to provide easy access. The links at the bottom of the blog are obviously wasting space and the uneven spacing makes it look out of place. With reference to the Japanese version, it's moved to directly below the blog navigation menu and links are in the form of drop-down selection menus. In terms of code I have to deal with each time I add a new link in the old one, it's a lot fewer and less confusing: I do it more frequently than the blue navigation box next to it.

Relating to the above, links pointing to something that is on the same site (blog) the link is posted at would have the main part of the URL would be omitted in the code. Example: "http://the1iam.blogspot.com/2010/05/alternate-dimension-other-saeko.html" could be shortened to just "/2010/05/alternate-dimension-other-saeko.html" by omitting "http://the1iam.blogspot.com" (27 characters) and would still work, if it's on the same blog.

When I load my main blog, I noticed that the is a lag between my bottom most post that appears on the main page, and the right sidebar. It seems that the old version of the above-mentioned navigation menu is a possible culprit as the code of the bottom widgets is before the sidebar. (I have a fast connection, so this might unnoticeable at times to me.) So, since I have 110 links in that navigation menu, I would save (110*27=2970 bytes) 2.9 Kilobytes or 23.2 Kilobits per load. Actual savings is more as I remove the old version.

This needs to go through further testing in different browsers and operating systems. Known browsers that would not render correctly include IE8 and the PS3's built in browser.

Minor changes to main blog

2010-03-20T22:34:00.001+08:00

The changes to my main blog in English include

changing of background image
increasing font size of blog post
auto-capitalizing post titles
increased spacing of post titles
code for "by Haruka Takahashi" next to the date at the top has been replaced with "by [data:post.author/]", where the value of that is currently "高橋はるか"
The "XXXth post: " is abolished and removed. Since there are too many posts with that, I would do it only on the 7 most recent posts there.
Images now have white margins and gray/black margins around it to simulate a photo frame with shadow. Future posts and posts that appear on the main page would have images to fit the posts horizontally is reduced from 100% to 90% so as to have the new margins & border to be visible.
Posts and sidebar widgets text alignment is now justified (adjusting spacing between words in a line in such a way that there is a clean, even edges on the right. (Look at this particular bullet-point and compare it to the rest if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Position of the date of post at the top has been moved to the right. Strangely enough, this also caused the post title to move up to be on the same line as the date.

An earlier change not mentioned: Link to the now-discontinued IMEEM has been change to my mobile-friendly Wordpress blog. It's manually synced with all of my blogger blogs, so you might see lags of new posts appearing there, and it would come as a big tide when it does.

(It's ironic that I hardly do anything to this blog that is saying the updates to my other blogs.)

Anime watch list changed

2010-03-13T19:34:00.000+08:00

What you are looking on the left is the new layout of the anime watch list. Not only does it takes up fewer space, there's less code for me to deal with, which is what I look at most of the time when updating it. The colour code on the far left represents the season it is for which is:

Orange: Autumn
Blue: Winter
Pink: Spring
Green: Summer

Those colours are from the older layout, and are arranged by the air date/time of their first episode, with newest anime at the bottom.

Since "Sora no Woto" and "Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu" would be ending in about 2 episodes, I deliberately left those under the older format. (But the font change slightly due to the universal settings to the rest.) As to why I changed "To Aru Kagaku no Railgun", there was no other Autumn anime (of any year) that I would like to watch, and I need to check the formatting. As for "Durarara!!", there were already announcements that there would be about 24 episodes in total.

In case you were wondering what the older version looked like, here it is:

Since images for Durarara and Railgun were replaced with another with the same image URL, the new images appear here.

Random change

2010-02-26T01:30:00.002+08:00

For an unplanned and totally random reason, I decided to change the layout and the icon image of my twitter page. I originally wanted to change to something with this colour scheme earlier, but it seemed inappropriate for the winter season.

With the end of winter, I'm tempted to do this. Background tiled image has been sitting in my documents folder longer than the time I had joined Twitter. The colour scheme came from screenshots of my main blog almost a year ago.

I have no plans to use the icon you see me using in the screenshot anywhere else.

Status of my vectors (15 january 2010)

2010-01-15T22:08:00.001+08:00

I know i have been quiet about it lately, but the vector v0091 is
cancelled. In its place is a yet-to-be-decided vector. Reason being
the complexity involved, lack of time, and, since first started,
better images were found.

That is, if i recover from my sleepiness, archive my old files, and
done catching up with anime aired for the past week.

Music Player removed

2009-12-20T12:40:00.000+08:00

Ages ago (in internet time), I've added a "Music Player" widget on most of my blogs. It's quite obvious as (at that time) I've turn on autoplay, though I've turned it off when I was sick of hearing the same songs. I don't know when it was, but I've quietly stopped using it when the music host (imeem) decided to reduce songs/playlist outside the site itself to 30-sec samples. Since I've disabled auto-play, I kind of forgotten about it, which is kind of good if I'm already listening to my own music when suddenly the song plays and it becomes annoying.

As recent as 8 December 2009, 12 days from this post (might be 11 because of time differences), imeem was bought by MySpace Music and entering the imeem.com URL would redirect to there, with apparently no way to transfer account/music over, including official accounts.

This means that all imeem players I've embeed would be removed, including its code. If it's in an account that I've abandoned for quite a long time (eg. Friendster), it's most likely those won't be removed as I don't even use those accounts anymore. Links to my imeem account would be removed, though they might have already been replaced by a link to my Twitter profile earlier in the year.

Anime Blog URL & Watchlist Updates

2009-11-12T09:16:00.003+08:00

The anime blog url has been changed from asuna888-en.blogspot.com to taksiru.blogspot.com
Entering the old url, would lead you to the new address, but a link to a particular post might not work now. The theme has also changed to match the japanese version.

My anime watchlist sidebar widget had some minor changes to display the episode titles. Images has also been changed from 100px*75px to 100px*100px, though might change again to 100px*125px due to the episode titles. The minimun height for each entry, however, remains at
the original height of 60px.

Meanings behind my Twitter lists

2009-10-31T13:55:00.008+08:00

At my Twitter page, you would notice that I have created lists of grouping people. If you look at it, you might not understand what they mean. Here are the lists:

kagakugijutsu (科学技術): Science and Technology
t1-: People from the United States of America and Canada.
t4-: People from Europe, including the United Kingdom
t5-: People from Latin America, including Mexico
t6-: People from Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand
t27: People from South Africa
t81: People from Japan
em2a: People who talk about Anime. The name is spelt backwards, with the "ni" (に) changed to "2"
podcast: Owns podcasts that I follow.
crs-gmi: Backward spelling of "img src" (image source). Owns sites with interesting info that I regularly visit, not necessarily images.

Do note that I have listed some of the people in more than one lists, or have yet to list, with the latter being overlooked or having a hard time deciding where to put them in.

PS. The layouts of the anime blogs has changed again, but with both English and Japanese version having completely different themes. The former is based on the technology blog, but using the background and colour scheme of the previous, while the latter was unchanged, but changed the background, font and with minor changes to the colour scheme.

Navigation of Stories Changed

2009-10-24T00:07:00.000+08:00

Snippets like this on the right image shows a sample of the first few words of my latest post via RSS. However, when it comes to my stories, especially on search engines, fewer parts of the actual story are visible as they look at the first few words like:

Story 2 Part 19 (middle link) is the worse as it's filled with navigation and notes and none of the actual story actually appearing there, though ironically, it has been fixed several days before Google's cache of that link.

The old navigation links looked something line:

[revised on 25 November 2008]
(continued from part 18)
(related: "Tokihi (Part 8)")
[Author's note: ...]

insert story text here

(to be continued in part 20)

That's why it appears in the snippets and search engine's summary as the notes occupy the top. Here's the newer format of the above:

insert story text here

← Part 18
Related: "Disoriented Feelings (Part 8)"
Part 20 →

[Author's note: ....]

[Revised: 16 February 2009]

This newer format cleans up the mess at the top. Links at the middle would lead to related parts, what chapter this is part of at my Wordpress blog, and so on. More importantly, the actual content of the post is visible in snippets and search results.

Due to an unexpected large amounts of parts I have done, changes will only be done when I decided to make changes to the post itself which is quite random or of my favorites, so you might see a mix of the old and new ones.

Of course, I don't change them blindly: I fixed broken/wrong links along the way. I was aware that in Story 4 Part 2, the link pointing to the continuing part actually points to the previous part. Also, Story 3 has already been renamed from "Tokihi" to "Disoriented Feelings" somewhere in June/July this year.

Ps. My anime blog layout theme looks awful when compared to the technology blog. It's ironic that I designed both of them.

Avatar changed

2009-10-13T00:08:00.002+08:00

Image at the top right of the navigation menu has been changed from to . In addition, the dimensions of viewable area has been changed from 65px*73px to 55px*55px so that it doesn't take up too much space, but will be vertically expanded automatically if the area left of it contain my feeds from Twitter. These images are based on my vectors numbered v0080 and v0088 respectively.

I have also changed the avatar image at twitter. Between the previous (Senjouhara Hitagi; from Bakemonogatari) and the current one (crop of v0088), I had been using the source image of it shortly before I decided to make a vector of it. However, when uploading the finished vector, I noticed that there is no image appearing in all the browsers, including those that has not been used for weeks. In its place was a broken image icon (blank or hover-over text as normal text in the case of Firefox) where the image supposed to be. I thought it's just me until someone pointed out (from the other side of the globe) that they are seeing the same problem.

The problem has now been fixed. Do note that the background is transparent.

Slight changes to Anime Watch List

2009-10-03T18:47:00.003+08:00

Left: Japanese version
Right: English version

Thumbnails has been changed from 60px*60px to 100px*75px. As a result, you can see more details. You might see it cropped in the table (eg. 90px*60px), but the same source image is used.

For the Japanese version, additional coding has been added to make it resemble the logo. Example: "生徒会の一存" has been changed to "生徒会の一存", but due to language reasons, I can't do the same for non-Japanese versions like how do I do "超電磁砲" (Chou Denjin Hou; note the first character) if it's supposed to be pronounced as "Railgun"? Unless there's an official logo in, say, English (which is not likely to appear until after the Japanese broadcast has ended),it's going to look strange.

For technical reasons, I also can't do outline around the text. The closest thing I could do is to have a background or a drop-down effect.

Oh, another oddness you might have noticed in the Japanese version for episode numberings instead of the usual "第2話": Umineko 12 is numbered as "III-I", K-On! 12 (2nd last ep) as "最終回", "第拾壹話" for Bakemonogatari 11, or "#08" and so on. It's based on the numbering shown in the episode itself at the same time as the episode title. On the English version, or if those numberings are not given and is not a special episode, I would follow the numbers that places like wikipeia are using. Anime like "Fullmetal Alchemist" do give the actual numberings along with the title like "第16話「戦友の足跡」"

For reasons not mentioned, Bakemonogatari seems to be using a lot of the old characters (旧字体/舊字體) and fraud-proof (eg. legal documents, cheques) versions for numbers. Also, text that should have been in hiragana are written in their katakana or (obsolete/rarely used) kanji forms. Like "有難ウ御座イマス" instead of "ありがとうございます".

[Drawings Blog] Change of post layout

2009-09-27T06:55:00.002+08:00

New posts on the drawings blog now have a new way to be presented. This comes less than a week after the new layout for song lyrics (finalized draft), though I haven't added colours for that.

The new layout has the sub-header at the side instead of the top and the following text corrected:

Comment: This was drawn on a notebook. → *This was drawn in a notebook.
コメント：メモ帳でこの絵をしました。 → ※このスケッチをノートに描かれた。
Pencil → Pencil Sketch
鉛筆 → 鉛筆画
鉛筆（編集された）→ 鉛筆画 (編集)
ベクトル（最初） → ベクトル (初期)
バックグラウンドなし → 無背景
アウトライン → 輪郭線
Original Image → Source Image
オリジナルの画像 → ソースイメージ

Although I did mention that I won't change earlier posts, I need to do some samples for regular (v0086), posts with sketches (v0020), landscape images (v0017), and variations of the original (v0030). Minor changes to vectors mentioned recently are also applied ahead of other posts that still have the older version.

Icon changed

2009-09-25T22:12:00.002+08:00

Icon images you see at the top left has been changed at all of my blog from whatever it was to . For anime blogs, it would be instead, the same as my Twitter image. Drawings and profile layouts blog remains unchanged.

This change is to standardize all the images and to indicate that I own them.

Note: You might see Blogger's icon instead or none at all if you are using Microsoft/Windows Internet Explorer.

Signature & Resolution changes to vectors

2009-09-21T14:19:00.004+08:00

(Left: Old, Right: New)

(Click on images to view at original resolutions)

With some figuring out, it actually took me a while to get to this. It's like you have been always been using the same route from Point A to Point B for quite a while when you suddenly found a new, quicker, route that has already been there for quite a long time out of curiosity.

The newer one is actually based on the version before the previous that appears on the initial version of vectors v0021 to v0059, but with the date and URL font size reduced. The text is now standardized to be aligned to the center at the bottom left unless it's not feasible to do so where it would be at other corners. Multiple dates appear if an earlier pencil version, when a major change was made, was half-completed but completed later on, or if you are looking at a variation of the original.

Unless it exceeds 1MB in file size, portrait images would now have a width of 1024px and landscape ones would have a height of 720px. This is an increase from both types having 1000px as the largest length. Outlines & background-less might also increase from 500px to 1000px for the longest length. High-res versions are unchanged, PDF would still reflect the older version unless significant changes (this is considered minor) are made or done after the change.

The change of resolution is so that you can use it as a wallpaper without it appearing pixellated and the bandwidth usage for the images seems quite low.

Progress of v0086

2009-09-13T01:30:00.002+08:00

(Info about the new blog layout: here)

Sorry about the long break: I had very little time to this, let alone update my blogs. I know the last was about 5 weeks ago and another 5 between the previous (v0085) and the one before that (v0084)

The amount candidates of images to vector from has increased, but the amount I have vectored has unchanged. The above is the amount of progress I had done so far since I started a few hours prior to this post. Although I have done this much already in a short time, it doesn't seem that I have the time to complete within the next 7 days. When it's done, I'll put it up on the same image hosting site as the other vectors in the usual resolution and update that small sidebar widget on the anime blogs, though might not appear on the drawings blog itself until a lot later.

Anyways, sfgdhjyfmjh is now renamed to v0000 since the previous name is kind of random and hard to remember. Links and some places might still reflect the old name.

Rejected Version of "An Unexpected Wish (Part 4)"

2009-08-23T13:45:00.002+08:00

Reason why it's rejected is that it seemed too emo and the pacing is done in such a way that it seems rushed.On top of that, I am already working on a 2nd version of part 4, which, at time of writing, is not complete. Except for spelling mistakes, this is left unchanged from the original source that was written in a notebook.

Nanami's time in High School seem to pass by quickly and is now studying in a well known university. She had help from a cousin she didn't knew she had until her grandmother mentioned her as her great-granddaughter. Nanami did hear about her in the news before, but didn't know that they were blood related, though noticed that the family name is the same. She also got in due to connections and a recommendation from her cousin. Because of her cousin's prophecy in another language, she studied at a globally well known university in America. Nanami can't because she doesn't understand that language well.

Nanami still keep in contact with Yuichi and Misae via messaging and social websites, but did not see face-to-face after the high school graduation as they have either started working or entered a different college.

As she gets older, trusting someone who is older or even of the same age is becoming harder but a family member or someone else known since young are still trustworthy to her. The problem is that her immediate family has been kill and knows little of her relatives, let alone see them.

Her grandmother likes to describe how she met her foreign husband and how different things were back then. Nanami thought of how much trouble she had went through without modern-day conviences. Along with photos, she introduces to Nanami her relatives, including the one who ensured a place in university. She also showed her a family photo with all the relatives when she was just nine years old.

Nanami's time in university seem to pass by more quickly despite it being actually longer than high school. As the time she last saw Yuichi and Misae is now longer than their time together, they are keeping less and less in contact. Nanami is now working with a company in Tokyo, managing their accounts. She has also married her husband she met during their time in university, though not used to being called by her married family name.

PDF versions of vectors

2009-08-10T01:45:00.000+08:00

Not sure if I had already mentioned this, but in early-July this year, I made PDF versions of the vectors and uploaded them to my hardly-used Wordpress account.

I would like to upload the original SVG file, but hosting sites don't seem to support them. PDF support on Wordpress is the closest I can to retain its vector properties. Previously, I would just put up the PNG only and made several versions of it (without background, outline, high-res, widescreen, etc.) somewhere only my (real-life) friends have access to.

Unfortunately, saving in PDF means that the blurring effect I had used is lost. v0029 and v0074 are examples of this. On top of that, image files used might have included in the file itself, which explains why the background is missing (v0019) or the file size being so large (v0058). A good reason to have the PNG versions.

On a side note, I have change the layout of the drawings blog. It's based on the one I did a while ago for the technology blog. Background and colour theme-wise, there are no major changes. Image icon has been changed from v0058 to v0085 and the title has been coverted from katakana to hiragana.

Trouble updating widgets

2009-08-08T20:45:00.003+08:00

Some weeks ago, I experienced problems updating the widgets at the side, which meant that I couldn't update the anime watchlist and links to my stories. This also meant that I can't edit or create new posts without heading to Blogger Draft version.

This problem happened across all browsers, but I noticed a slightly higher chance of saving widget changes in Apple Safari.

The bug has now been fixed.

Pre-written posts

2009-08-01T01:50:00.003+08:00

I had mentioned somewhere on my Twitter account or main blog that I had written into a notebook. Well, they are written in pen/pencil and it's hard to insert new sentences without affecting what has already written.

If you had saw me writing it, it won't be out until the beginning of the following month (September 2009), when I run out of scheduled posts to put up. As for those sentences that makes it embarrassing, I would omit/rewrite it: weird things were going through my mind when I was writing it.

(Can you tell where the links are in the middle of a sentence on this blog? Even I can't tell until it's hovered over.)

Ich bin sehr verärgert.

2009-07-26T14:45:00.001+08:00

Miért van ez a személy a másolást nekem? Man nepatīk tas. Les exemples incluent la copie de celui du blog, les mises en page, les comptes. Vaikka se on aivan selvää, että hän kopioida minua, hän väittää toisin. Ele está tirando sarro de mim mesmo agora.

Is it me or does Blogger not load things properly? I can't save the sidebar widgets the regular way.

New layout (1 July 2009)

2009-07-01T21:07:00.002+08:00

I've changed the blog layout of the technology blog to the above. It's actually based on the earlier layout for my main blog in Japanese. This was achieved by removing the colour and background image of the main frame and applying it to the posts and sidebar background. The rounded corners are actually done with CSS instead of images. The disadvantage about the latter is that it has a fixed width of the entire area it is on without looking out of place, also it has the difficult to modify later on. Like the previous version here, the top navigation menu has been moved to the top.

The header and the sidebar navigation menu background image is actually the same as the background. With the CSS code "background-attachment:fixed;" added on top of that, it looks as though that there is a hole there. However, IE6 users might see the following instead:

Layout (CSS2) are not loaded correctly, video in first post (HTML5) does not load, PNG images with an alpha layer (transparency) is not rendered correctly, text is rendered horribly (WinME and earlier, WinXP without ClearType enabled), among other problems. Makes the blog look horrible when compared to the top image. Only reason why I am mention this despite being old is that many people are still using it. IE8 still incorrectly renders the top navigation menu and does not feature the rounded corners.

It's ironic that this updates blog does not have any layout changes for quite a long time. To tell you the truth, this blog itself is the oldest blog I have here. The blog ID has only 8 digits while the newest has 19 digits!

Speaking of new, Firefox 3.5 makes a lot of pages look outdated.

New layout (18 June 2009)

2009-06-18T09:11:00.002+08:00

I have replaced the Japanese version of my main blog with this new layout. Readers who had been to my layout-testing blog recently (before it got marked as a spam blog) or had been to my main blog (in English) around Mid-2008 or earlier with "Hatena :: Diary" at the top left. (Hatena is where the layout came from and had to modify to be usable as Blogger Classic code.) This was because the old one started to looked awful and it's kind of ironic that both the English and Japanese started off with the same layout theme at the time I first implemented it (forgot when that was though) and that the former blog started to drift apart. The same layout code was also gradually applied to all my other blogs, but with modifications to make them look different.

With this change, I have also changed the side navigation menu to the new style since the old one didn't really match well and can't even see the first post without scrolling down a bit. It's been cleaned up with fewer images and having one of the sidebars removed. The space freed up really helped me a lot on making the blog look better.

I looked back at it earlier this week and decide to use it, but I want it to work with Blogger XML instead of the Classic one to modify it easily. I don't need to get a whole new code: I just need to modify the existing one. If you ask me to do the same thing just a year ago, I probably would not know how to do it. Editing the size and additional words to the date involves further digging into the code accessible with the "Expand Widgets Templates" option checked. What annoyed me is that using Blogger's "Font and Color" settings seemed to only work for the colours and not the typeface of the text despite the code being there and had to modify the code manually.

Speaking of codes, I obtained the colour codes via Inkscape (the program I used to do my vectors) by pressing the button to take a screenshot (in Linux, a prompt soon follows asking where to save the screenshot you just did) and pasting it into the the program. This can get tricky: the bottom part (percentage varies) may become corrupted and appears to be random. Do note that the screenshot might be saved as "pastedpic_***.png" at the folder of where you last saved a file with this program (If unsure, check the properties.). To overcome this, paste the image in Paint first and save it as a PNG (or BMP) file and import it. Since the area of the colour you want to choose, especially text, you might want to use the browser's zoom feature to the area in question before taking the screenshot.

The search box at the bottom right is rather unique too. Since it was copied over from the old code, which itself was from Hatena, I don't really know how it appears to be transparent, is fixed on top, and does not move while scrolling the page. I only know how to change the content or position it.

This comparison image was from last year, describing how different the layout of my latest post (back then) was rendered in various browsers with visible differences. Safari is the one that follows the web standards the most, and Internet Explorer (version 6 and earlier especially) the least.

I didn't make a screenshot before to the current layout, but I did manage to find one of the same layout from quite some time ago:

(It doesn't really differ much, doesn't it?)

And here's the one from before I used that layout:

(Looks nice, but the header image is too large. Despite the large screenshot, the first post can't be seen here. That thing between the header and the ad is an early version of the current side navigation menu. Can't believe how large the text was.)

Will I apply the new layout to the English version too? Well, I haven't decided on that yet, but I did apply the same, consistent, layout for the Anime (Japanese & English) and drawings blogs that previously had bizarre layouts and inconsistency that, looking back, is horrible.

Re-writing code of anime watch list

2009-06-14T01:02:00.002+08:00

Although the newer version might appear identical to the previous version, the code used has been changed. The old code contain stuff like "tr" or "wbr" that I don't really understand. Also, the old table code might appear inwards on Gecko-based browsers (eg. Firefox), but appear normal on other browsers. There also was this mysterious gap between two images.

With code learn from the current versions of my story and the navigation menus, I decided to apply it here too. Using the trial-and-error method at the testing blog (to try something new and in the case something goes wrong), I managed to put this up.

Under the hood changes include:

Changing font colour codes: "white" and "black" became "#fff" and "#000" respectively.
Using CSS codes instead of HTML to create the border and background colour. (This seems to fix the problem)
Used stylesheet for the thumbnails as a background instead of as an image source.
The first column below the header of each set of tables are now merged and the text aligned to the right.
Table-within-a-table was used to create listing itself.
Since the image URLs are move to somewhere else, the codes are easier to work on.

Noticeable changes include:

Removal of "Current (...)" and "Upcomming (...)" and kept the words in prephansis.
Header text is now aligned to the left.
"Segoe UI" and "Myriad Pro" fonts are used for the English version, while "Meiryo" (メイリオ) and "VL PGothic" (VL Pゴシック) will be used for the Japanese versions. (Note: Segoe UI and Meiryo is included in Windows Vista or newer and recent versions of Microsoft Office/Live, Myriad Pro is included with Mac OS X and in a hidden folder of Adobe Reader. VL PGothic comes with OpenOffice.org, and is most likely to be included with recent versions of various Linux distributions if Japanese was installed as one of the display languages.)
Images for Umineko, Yoku, and Kobato are added.
"Ep" is replaced by "Currently at episode" and "Date" is replaced by "Commencing on"

Although not related, but happened shortly before the change, I had updated the dates of the anime and rearrange them by date. Haruhi and Hayate had swapped places as the former airs earlier.

Changes in the navigation menu

2009-06-03T01:01:00.003+08:00

Well, my navigation menu you see on the top of the right widget bar is starting to get messier and uglier that I have decided to do a brand new one from scratch. Actually, it got ugly and bulkier from the last update. Not only in appearance, but also the code involved. They are originally supposed to all look the same, with only the title and type of blog changed.

(extracted from an earlier post)
The navigation menu featured here is what it looked like when I first made it. Clean and simple. That empty space there was intentional, but I added random quotes or "Haruka Takahashi's Network". For ones that had the former, it was latter replaced with my latest post from Twitter. Also, hovering over a link there would have a background, but as I found out later on, this also affected other links on the blog. That problem wasn't really fixed until just last month.

(From Updates and Anime blog (English version) blogs.)
Shortly after doing v0030a, I replaced the image and have it aligned to the left. I have also made the links larger and if you hover the row where a particular link is, an image would appear. These are 60*60 images that are (at that time) also used for displaying my drawings on my non-main blogs, which itself, has now changed to 80*80 versions. In the case of the links to the Main and Technology blogs, new ones were used. If the blog does not already have a search box, I would add it as part of the menu.

(Japanese & English versions of my main blogs. Search box is not part of the navigation menu.)
The pink/red colours were originally part of an experiment to try different colours of the navigation menu, but didn't really work out well, especially with the strong red for the title. Since both blogs uses mostly pink/red and matches more than the blue version, I have left it untouched.

Also, I found the images to be quite small and decided to have it occupy the entire row. At first, it was to have the image to gradually fade from transparent to opaque from left to right and have it aligned on the far right, but it looked horrible and editing the images to get it was too troublesome. So I gave up and have it to occupy it completely. Since the blog layout that has this menu the widest is the drawings blog (back then) at 280px, I used that as reference for the maximum width.

(Technology, Drawings, and Anime (Japanese) blogs)
Not too long ago, Yukari changed her navigation menu and me changing my Twitter page (on the same day as I found images of both the avatar and background). Though simple, it actually looked nice. So in order to improve mine, I have to dump all the image codes except the avatar. The avatar is the exact same image used at Twitter, so the area for my avatar has been reduced from 80*80 to 72*72. Originally, they are supposed to have just a white background, but I use the same background as the blog background or any other image that are already used on the blog. This not only makes it looks nicer, but also save bandwidth from loading the images. Since having an image to appear when hovering over a link is removed, even more bandwidth is saved. That black semi-transparent background is actually recycled from the old drawings blog and helps reading against the textured image easier.

Except for the Anime blog in English, I'm not sure if I want to apply the new version to blogs that are still using the older version for legacy reasons or would actually match the blog layout the most. Currently, the diagonal length of the menu on the Japanese main blog is 5 inches, but the drawings blog is 3 inches. That is quite a lot. I might also replace the avatar of the new navigation menu with an identical-looking v0080 when I'm done with it.

Twitter page

2009-05-30T04:47:00.002+08:00

As an anniversary of reaching 666 posts (not really, but was coincidental), I have changed my Twitter profile page.

Before (via Google cache as at 26 May):

After:

What was not shown is that the avatar was also changed at the same time that looked something like .

Quite a dramatic change, eh?

Drawings widget removed

2009-05-28T20:08:00.004+08:00

Since it's redundant to the drawings blog and takes up too much memory and physical space,I have removed the drawings widget on the Main Blog in English, For now however, similar widgets (though might be of different design) on other blogs are left untouched.

With the empty space left behind, I have moved the box with links to the stories I had written there to that space and made some modifications to have it in the horizontal format instead of the previous vertical positioning format. Notice that the table itself was redesigned recently from a basic plain table. The table may look different due to formatting used for this blog, but codes are not modified from the original.

Vertical format:

ストーリ

もう一つの世界

第1話

トキヒ

第1話、第2話、第3話、第4話

偶然な願い

最初話、第2話、第3話

ノート (英語)

2008年08月11日

making a novel

2008年10月18日

walking home at night; About the "Alternate Dimention" story

2008年12月11日

similarities I noticed

2008年12月12日

rejected version of "Alternate Dimension (Part 15)"

2008年12月15日

progress of v0046 and about "Alternate Dimension (Part 15)"

2009年02月08日

333rd post: Timeline and Character info

2009年04月16日

Rejected Version of "Tokihi (Part 10)"

Horizontal:

Stories & Reviews

An Original Story By Me

Main:	01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, Final
Spin-offs:	01

Alternate Dimension

Main:	01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26
Specials:	Valentine's Day

Tokihi

Main:	01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09
Specials:	Narration Overview, Train Incident

An Unexpected Wish

Planned regular releases while away for a long time. Might release other posts during that time.

K-On!

01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08

The Story of a North High Student

Notes

11 August 2008	making a novel
18 October 2008	walking home at night; About the "Alternate Dimention" story
11 December 2008	similarities I noticed
12 December 2008	rejected version of "Alternate Dimension (Part 15)"
15 December 2008	progress of v0046 and about "Alternate Dimension (Part 15)"
8 February 2009	333rd post: Timeline and Character info
16 April 2009	Rejected Version of "Tokihi (Part 10)"

Edit: I don't know what caused that large empty space.

thinking of a new layout

2009-05-13T21:42:00.002+08:00

This is one of the default layouts at Wordpress. I tried to apply my stuff there, but I find the interface confusing over that of blogger. Also, HTML coding I applied there seems to be stripped down to just the text with colours and links.

navigation menu icons changed (again)

2009-05-08T22:03:00.001+08:00

On some of my blogs, I have changed the images with this new style. I wanted to do this earlier, but didn't know how. Turns out that I could use an image-editing software that has been installed on the computer, but rarely used, to do this (GIMP). All the time, I was trying to see if the program I had always been using (Inkscape) has this feature. I still need the latter program for sizing and cropping to the exact dimensions though.

For example, if you were to hover over "Anime", the new version should display as the background. For the older version, it would be or, if I didn't modify as a result of the recent resizing of square thumbnails, . Notice the gradual transparency. As there are some problems with the colour scheme with these new images, I might need to do some adjusting or even replace with new ones. ~~Problem is that, except for ones based on my vectors, finding the original source image again is hard as they are scattered all over.~~ I might also have to remove the borders and that background colour when hovering over text links anywhere on that page.

If you didn't know, that image is from the infamous "WASUREMONO" scene:

Anime watch list changes (5 May 2009)

2009-05-05T00:29:00.004+08:00

Nothing major this time. As I have updated the upcoming anime list, it would be appropriate for me to update the list too. That list contains only the anime I would like to watch, not everything. Except ones that do not have an official website, hovering over the text for a while would have the alternate language name to appear.

Anyways, here are the changes:

Removed "Saki" entry
Changed icon image for "Eden of the East"
Added image for "Winter Sonata"
Moved "Taishō Yakyū Musume." from "Autumn/Unknown" to "Summer"
"Yoku Wakaru Gendai Mahō" has been confirmed to first air on 11 July
Added "Sora no Manimani", "Tokyo Magnitude 8.0", "Umineko no Naku Koro ni", "Zan Sayonara Zetsubō Sensei", "Kobato.", and "To Aru Kagaku no Railgun"
Except for "Umineko no Naku Koro ni" and "Kobato.", all names mentioned in the previous point has images added.

I'm planning to redesign the way my vectors are displayed for my main blogs (v3). The earlier version (v2) is only suitable to be displayed at the sidebar, which, the main blogs lacks in the horizontal section. Right now, it's using an even earlier version (v1).

Why would I want to change?

ugly overall layout design
inconsistency with other non-main blogs (even the drawings blog uses v2)
fails in space optimization
inconsistent size of thumbnails, despite all having a common height. V2 has fixed this problem by cropping certain areas with the thumbnail being at common dimensions. Thumbnails used in v3 may be larger than that used in v2.

In order to optimize load times, I have reduced the number of posts per page. I would remove the Tokyo bid for the 2016 summer Olympics countdown when it's over. I should also do something about the banner image as it was never cropped (only hidden from view), so when loading the page, the whole image loads, resulting in longer load times when viewing it for the first time or did not have an earlier cache of it. I'm also aware that internet providers for readers in places like the US have bandwidth caps and charge more if exceed it. (40GB cap plus US$1 for each additional GB exceeding the cap for Time Warner Cable, according to Leo Laporte of twit.tv)

To make things clear on how much bandwith might be saved between v1 and v2, I have found out that uses many times less memory than , but since resizing codes were used, the latter thumbnail is actually . Also, I have earlier reduced the maximum of the smallest length from 1800px to 1280px, and now to 1024px. If I didn't change, v0058 would be just above 1MB, the limit for most image hosting sites. For simplicity's sake, I might also reduce the size from 1024px to 1000px in the future. That small difference might reduce bandwidth and memory space too.

counter changed

2009-04-20T01:23:00.002+08:00

Less than 24 hours ago, I have decided to changed my counter provider. I'm not saying the reason why I did so other than that the code for the counter could be easily be use by anyone.

The old one had reached 2109 when I decided to completely remove it (I was the 2100th). Except for my main blog in English (which starts at 2100), all counters would restart at 0. I started the previous counter at end-2008, but I started blogging 2 years before that at this very blog I am posting this in. (Back then, it was called "Neverending New Beginnings" and the URL was just the1iam.blogspot.com, but stuff happened until I have 14 blogs on mainstream sites, 10 of which, are active.)

With the new one, I am now able to tell how much people are viewing each of my blogs, what page they were viewing before coming into mine, what country they are from, what browser, resolution, and operating system they were using. Not surprisingly, the large majority of the traffic were to my anime blog in Japanese. Besides Google and Yahoo! Japan (owned by Softbank, not Yahoo! Inc.), search engines to that particular blog also include BIGLOBE and @nifty. Majority of the traffic to there include "とらドラオープニング歌詞" (Toradora opening lyrics), "歌詞まりあほりっく" (Maria Holic lyrics). On a slightly related note, my main blog also had "けいおん ED 歌詞" and "Cagayake!Girls", which is a result of me posting a draft post there on Saturday. I would put up a finalised version when it's done. I might replace the video with the widescreen in HD later on and maybe add closed captioning of the lyrics.

I have even found the page where my page were refered from, and it's only today:

(First screenshot was about the lyrics of the first Toradora opening. Second was about the 2009 re-runs of Haruhi.)

Well, it's hard to say if all this stastics are of any use to me, but it certainly a whole lot better than to not knowing if there are even people viewing my posts. Numbers are meaningless if you don't know what they are for.

According to the ads I put up since October 2007 (earlier than the webcounter), there were 58707 page impressions.

Rejected Version of "Tokihi (Part 10)"

2009-04-16T19:56:00.003+08:00

Once again, I have written a lot of stuff down that mid-way through doing it, found it unsuitable. In this case, however, was because of what I had done for part 25 of the 2nd story (link below) and got carried away with it since it's done just right after. I ended up doing it as a special instead. The reason being that the time it's set is in May Y4, but the incident mentioned here happens in December Y6, which is unsuitable due to the rushed nature of the plot and, as you can see, describes how the main character of the 3rd story would die if events in Part 25 onwards of the 2nd story did not happen. The special I just did is based on, is if the prevention leading to the event did not happen from the victim's point of view, which, coincidentally, happens to be a main character of the 3rd story.

(Continued from Part 9)
(Related: "Alternate Dimension (Part 25)")

I soon reached home. A lot had happened in school earlier, but the major thing that I did was to show a side of me that others have never seen me with before. Unlike all the other guys, Itsuki never did anything to attract my attention. What puzzles myself is that I am attracted to him, as though my instinct tells me to go with him. I don't really know... wait a minute, my chair seems to have been moved and the seat feels warm and is different from my body heat. It seems that a girl a year older than me was here recently... How is that possible? The door and windows are locked with me having the only keys to those and neither were there signs of breaking in. I have hidden a camera in the celing lights, so I can see what's going on.

Watching the footgage, a girl of my cousin's school in her summer uniform appeared out of thin air. Summer uniform? I thought everyone is wearing the winter ones now, and how is her appearing out of thin air possible? Teleport? Time travel? Those seemed far-fetched, but there's no other exeplenation. Her face and behaviour is very much like Itsuki, but there's no one staying at his house besides himself. Her body seem to be very much like that of a real girl, so it's not possible for her to be Itsuki crossdressing (eww...). She then seem to do something to my computer and then disappear into thin air with a white flash shortly before I entered my room. Looking at what she did, it seems that she had only copied files to my desktop and move over to to another. What are these files?

I open the video file. What I found odd is that the date embedded in the video is the Christmas season of two years from now and it seemed to be a recorded security camera footage. I saw myself deep in thought about something where two guys popped out of nowhere, grab a hold of me and poured huge amounts of liquid of some sort at my eyes. For some reason that seemed to cause pain to my eyes, seeing that I am madly trying to rub my tightly shut eyes, as though trying to relief extreme pain there. Those guys then spun me around a lot of times before pushing me onto the tracks. How mean of them!

Later in the video, I noticed that I was trying to force my eyes open, but failed to. At the same time, trying desperately to get out, but doesn't know which direction to go as the me in the video is too dizzy and blind to know. When I noticed the railroad crossing barrier moving down, I started to get even more desperate and running around aimlessly in the hope I get out of there. This seemed to continue on until I was hit by an oncomming train . The rest of the video was the arrival of police to cordoned off the place as a crime scene. They even covered my body, something they would do if that person had died.

What is this video? A video of me being killed just like that in the near future? But it seems too real for it to be an act. The other file contains two news article relating to the event. One is about the incident happening, while the other contains autopsy reports saying that the liquid that was poured onto my eyes have caused me to permanently go blind (really?) and eyewitness reports saying the people who attacked are strongly linked to the organization that has been targeting my company a lot lately. A funeral has (according to the report dated in the future) been set up for me and that my entire school has a moment of silence and comments from my teachers, classmates, would-be juniors about how good I was. They even interview Itsuki and he said how good I was and loved him. Everyone in the city seems to pay their last respects to me.

Well, I would be sad if I found out that someone close to me were to pass on, but of myself? I don't know what to believe. If it's true, I should take preventive measures. I should start with bringing down their organization or avoid that place completely at that time. But what was I deep in thought with that I don't notice them in the first place?

That is as far as I could go. I might use this when the time in the storyline reaches around November or December Y6. Since it's currently at May Y4, it may take a while to reach there, not to mention that it would co-inside with the other stories.

The problem I'm facing is when writing a part that coincide with another, besides evens that did not affect or involve them, I find that things might be written wrongly, partly due to conflict of what has been written in earlier parts and it's hard to locate or correct them. As you can see, each part of my story is quite long even if the images are to be excluded with text being at regular size.

(Note: "Tokihi" was renamed to "Disoriented Feelings" on 16 June 2009.)

Frequent layout changes

2009-04-14T19:20:00.002+08:00

(She's laughing at me...)

There are 3 reasons why I have been changing layout frequently lately, minor or major.

Someone copied me
Someone complained about a layout/element to me
The previous layout has become boring/outdated.

If point 1 were to happen, I might just ignore it unless it looks exactly like mine AND if I can find it.
For point 2, the first thing I would do is to check who it's from. In most cases, the next step would to modify/remove the offending thing or even completely change the layout.
Point 3 could be because the seasons have changed, the old one looking ugly/outdated, or would not support something new. Even if it does, it might not look nice. Also, this could also be because of point 2 where I was in a rush to change.

I think I would let Yukari to change the layouts she has control over for now. I have too much stuff to do now.

stories list menu redesigned

2009-04-13T19:23:00.002+08:00

To make things more organized, I have redone the "Stories I wrote here" section of the main blog.

3 links in a column is the best I could do without it looking horrible on a 1024 x 768 screen. If the width of the sidebar in it were to be wider, I might accordingly add more.

I have also added feeds of people of Tweeter tweets that has "@asuna888" added to their message. If "@asuna888" is not at the beginning of the message, I will not see it as replies, but it will appear in the feeds if it's the 5 most recent that includes it anywhere in the message.

navigation menu icons changed

2009-04-09T19:12:00.003+08:00

The navigation menu has been changed recently. With the previous 30px*30px being smaller, and with the introduction of the 60px*60px thumbnail images used for the new way to display my drawings and anime watch list, I find that the larger ones are more flexible as I can use a common image. That means that the drawings blog can now use the same font size as all the other blogs. (The current version of the anime watch list looks different from what I mentioned in the link, as I used what was previously links to friend's blogs. Those links have been upgraded to blog lists at the bottom right.)

Since I have already done 78 vectors, including varying versions of it, it should be more than enough to choose from. The images uses the vector closest to what it represents. However, for the technology and main blogs, I have to look around for the images and make a thumbnail of it. It was not easy to search and figure out the area and size of the thumbnail as the images are not square (aspect ratio of 1:1). Because of this change, the cropped background-less version of v0030, that was at the left of the navigation menu below the header image for the main blog, has been replaced with the same respective icon.

Another new feature added to the menu is that if you were to click on the table cell the link is at, it would function the same as the link, although the cursor might not change and you won't know that the area the cursor is hovered over is a link until you click on it. I could change the cursor to the hand, but the code for the menu is already long, and would confuse people who click with the scroll wheel (to open the link in a new tab) and have nothing happening. For blogs that have a different language version, clicking the area outside the link will bring to that page. (Clicking on the link itself might only load the page again.) The drawings blog is a curious example: where would clicking the link bring you to? The version that receives more views. If you're not sure, use the worded links.

Layout of main blog in English changed

2009-03-30T03:06:00.004+08:00

This wasn't really planned, but I have changed the blog theme of the main blog in English. The structure of the layout is not changed, but the images and colours are. Font size and typeface might also be changed later.

Before:

After:

It may not be obvious, but the height of the banner image has changed from 253px to 260px. The current colour scheme of the sidebar is not new as it's already being used on the main blog in Japanese and the drawings blog. You can say that the change is for the spring season, where it represents a new start from the blossoming of the cherry blossom trees. That's why the school year starts in April.

As for what was mentioned in the previous post, I have yet to start resizing, but I did manage to do some progress with v0072. In fact, it's almost complete.

How did I take the screenshot of before & after if it wasn't planned? Well I opened the tab to play music before I started, checked if a background image (now used as the header) would fit and so on. After I was done, I open a new tab after the change, but the version before the change is still open and did not press the refresh button.

5 April edit: It's been brought to my attention that there is a copycat from someone I first saw at friendster 2 years ago. Though not perfect, it's largely resembles my site. Please look at the URL.

Images of drawings blog changed

2009-03-29T03:38:00.002+08:00

Ever since the drawings blog has changed the blog layout to what was previously used on the English Anime blog, I find that since most post were posted via Windows Live Writer, some of the images that is supposed to be transparent or had special effects on it (I don't know why Yukari put them in) had the background of the older layout, on top of the size being too big and overlapping the sidebar.

What I will be planning to do is to reduce all existing regular-sized versions to be reduced from 1280px to 1080px. This is so that images takes lesser time to load and have the size reduced (not thumbnails) looks better. Thumbnails, initial, and other versions of it are unaffected. I might also have the link of the thumbnails at the side there point to the post of it instead of the actual image itself.

(Those other versions, including High-res versions, are in the public folder of the Windows Live Skydrive belonging to someone I know. To get to it, you have to find it via that person's blog and look for the link to it. Hint: That blog is listed under "My Blog List" on my main blog in English. In the pink section of friends' blogs for the Japanese version. Of course, there is a direct link on my Facebook under "Websites" to the profile of it,)

PS. Yukari is rather slow on on putting up my vectors. She's just posted v0068 a while ago, but I had done up to v0071 and about to start working on v0072! What is she doing?

New layout (21 March 2009)

2009-03-21T21:38:00.003+08:00

I know I just made one barely 3 days ago, but I spent most of today creating a new one. I made this by (heavily) modifying the code that was originally meant for my main blog before the current identical-looking version was used. Since I heavily modify it beyond recognition, it would be safe to say that I made it.

So here it is:

And here's how it looks before that:

This was taken shortly before the change, so the navigation menu and the search bar has already been separated and the video size reduced. The empty space on the right is the space for an ad, but there's nothing to display there. However, this wasn't what it was supposed to look like and is supported to be identical to the English version, but due to technical difficulties with the blog layout of the latter, only the colours and images were used instead of an entire change.

Here is what it was supposed to look like:

(Notice the navigation menu between the first post and the right sidebar)

Since then, the English version layout was replaced with a layout identical to the layout you see here, the updates blog, and then the layout mentioned in the previous post.

Oh, what was the layout before that? Well, let's say it looks horrible... Huh? You want to see it? Fine, here it is:

Ah, did you notice? As time passed by, you could see more and more of the first post of the blog. I want to apply this to more blogs, but the layouts there are too nice to replace or would not be suitable. In case you were wondering, this is based on an identical theme that was designed for Wordpress blogs.

New layout (18 March 2009)

2009-03-19T03:34:00.002+08:00

I have applied a new layout to the English edition of the anime blog earlier. This layout is different from what I mentioned earlier, which I ended up applying to one of my hidden blogs, but the drawings does use that theme. Anyways, I changed the themed because it seemed somewhat ugly and outdated because it was made for the autumn theme (which was back in October...) and eyesore to look at now to me.

If you find that banner image familiar, that's because the character is from v0051 of my vectors I did back in end-December 2008, which is from "K-on! (けいおん！)" that has an April (Spring) 2009 anime. It's also used as the banner of my IMEEM profile, though the character is larger in terms of DPI. For the background, it's based on the widescreen version of v0003.
(The widescreen version is an easter egg: You have to go to my image server/host or wordpress. The downloadable version of the various versions (including high-res) too.)

I'm not sure if I should call this layout theme as complete. I think I should add Twitter and IMEEM links there seeing that I had those added to my main blog.

I don't know if I should apply to the Japanese version due to sizing issues. As you may know, that blog has received the most number of views. This is partly because it appears as the first link when searching in Google. There is now a sharp contrast of the blog layout designs of the English and Japanese versions. LOL

I might also use this layout on the drawings blog too as that is ugly as hell too. Since most of the post there are uploaded via Windows Live Writer, you might see the background of the old one. As for the reason why only the "Vector (current)" is not clear is because of that program. Besides, I don't want to use up a lot of the limited Blogger/Picasa total image space of 1GB.

minor changes to anime watch list

2009-03-10T00:02:00.005+08:00

		Episode
	Toradora!	21
	Clannad: After Story	21
	To Aru Majutsu no Index	21
	White Album	10
	Maria Holic	10

	とらドラ！	第21話
	CLANNAD ~AFTER STORY~	第21話
	とある魔術の禁書目録	第21話
	WHITE ALBUM	第10話
	まりあ†ほりっく	第10話

The above are the changes I had made to the existing anime watch list of both the English and Japanese versions of my main blog. The only changes I made was to add images to the left of the title, table borders more visible, and to align the episode numbers at the center. With just these, you can already see the difference as compared to the earlier version that contains only text and links.

The idea came shortly after making thumbnails as a solution to the inconsistent thumbnails for my drawings not too long ago. Except for "To Aru Majutsu no Index", the thumbnails are made from a quick search using Google Images.

"To Aru Majutsu no Index" uses the same image as that for my vector thumbnails. There are vectors done for "Clannad" and "Toradora!" series, but they don't describe the series well and/or don't contain (one of) the main character(s).

If I can come up with an idea on how to make this better and the time to do it, I would, but now is not the time for it. Vector v0068 is about half done and "Alternate Dimension (Part 23)" is almost done. The sidebar navigation menu and drawings widget (both old and new) are both created by me from scratch.

Due to technical reasons, I can't upgrade the anime watch list that appears on the Japanese-language anime blog. Also, I'm aware that, for Internet Explorer users, my drawings may appear larger than your browser window. The cause of this is the percent (%) based instead of pixel (px) based value for the width of the image. With the final version of IE8 releasing quite soon and the fact that other browsers that are more web-standards compliant like Firefox and Safari/Crome renders it correctly, I don't see the point of fixing it, especially IE6, which is considered outdated but ironically still widely used today. Blame this on people not aware/seeing the need to upgrade, preferring XP over Vista on a new PC for "compatibility reasons" or cite problems in Vista they heard that has already been fixed a long time ago.

New way to display drawings

2009-03-07T14:50:00.000+08:00

If you have been to my layout testing blog recently, you would have noticed that there is a newer format of the way my drawings are displayed as part of the blog layout. It certainly looks better than the earlier version with fixed sizes for the thumbnails.

Although unintentional, when you hover over the thumbnails, there would be a nice highlight on the empty space below the image when you hover over it. This was a spillover that was applied to the whole blog from the codes of my navigation menu normally placed at the very top of the sidebar.

As of typing this, I am in the middle of editing for the drawings blog. The widget of that blog contains all of my drawings instead of featured ones, the thumbnails (yes, I make those manually) may take a while to do so. Until I'm done with it, the older version would still be there, below it.

The Japanese version of the anime blog will only have it replaced at the same time as the blog layout, but there are no plans to change the ones on my main blog as of this time due to space constrains.

As for the colours used, I haven't really decided other than to follow the theme. It looks nice on a blog with a nice use of colours, but horrible on one that isn't. It is possible for me to use the one you see in the image.

what I'm up to now

2009-03-05T21:39:00.003+08:00

Seeing that I am busy until mid-March, most of my stuff will not be updated for quite a while. I'm aware that the post on most of my blogs (except the main English) doesn't have any new posts for quite a while.

What I had done recently is updating of a forum, my YouTube Channel, IMEEM profile, and dannychoo.com profile.

As long time readers might know, the English anime blog was originally my main blog, which itself succeeded this updates blog. Anyways, that layout you see currently was actually replaced with an another identical layout, but was buggy. That's why you didn't see me changing the Japanese version other than the colours and images. The layout I replaced with was actually base on my current main blog theme that was used for Autumn and modify the codes to remove the left sidebar and making it look similar to the earlier. If you were to click the link at the bottom of my blogs that is based on this layout (basically all except the ones with Yukari as the co-author), you would notice it bares very little resemblance to the original as I had heavily modify it.

The drawings and anime blogs (both english and japanese) need to be revamped as the current layout looks horrible compared to my main english and technology blogs. Unfortunately, I won't be able to change it for quite a while and may not even bother changing. On the english anime blog, you might notice me putting up this post. The truth behind this post is that I want to put up reviews of recent anime episodes. But I lack the time to post such things and the time it takes for me to vector or write a story eats up a lot of hours.

To my friends: Forgive me if I'm ignoring your calls or can't hear me talking. I'm not good at communicating vocally to the point that my spoken and written vocabulary are completely different. I would rather you message me than to calling. (Messaging me to call you is still considered calling.)

progress of v0066

2009-02-23T01:33:00.002+08:00

I started doing this right after doing v0065 on the 21st February 2009. Right now, I am almost done with the outline. Since the original is a monochrome image drawn by pencil, I had a hard time figuring out which are the shades and which are the outlines on top of multiple lines that could have otherwise be represented as only 1 line (eg. the tatami mat frames at the bottom left). I have also put up colours based on my judgment or earlier vectors at roughly at where they should be.

What I'm trying to do besides that is to redesign the character's heads, especially the 3rd, 5th and 6th from the front as the original was done in August 2005. If you had payed attention to the character designs of anime back then and now, you can see that the character designs have been improving. One such example is the 2002 and 2006 versions of Kanon where even though the storyline is about the same, the visuals of the newer one looked a lot better. Of course, this could possibly mean using the "cut and paste" method from earlier vectors or other source images and edit those from there. I try not to have it look like v0015, which looks horrible, but more like v0018 where I added the bottom half from elsewhere and modify the existing parts so that it blends nicely. Others include the head of v0007 & v0021, the legs of v0016 & v0016a, the eyes of v0035 & v0037, background of v0053, features images and drawings in v0058, colours for v0016 (again), v0030a, v0056, v0056a, v0056b, v0060, v0065. v0038 is a special case where the enlarged characters in colour, but cropped, also features the characters in full, but in monocrome with text over it, in the same source image. More complex I had done before include v0030, v0046, v0048, v0050, v0051, v0058, and v0061.

(Looks at the previous paragraph) Sorry, I got carried away. Anyways, looking at how complicated and how long I could take to release this, I may release several vectors numbered after this (v0066).

I'm posting this in the middle of the night, so I'm feeling tired and sleepy by now, so I shall end this here now.

PS. My YouTube profile is updated to look like my main blog. It actually looks a lot better; even better than other poeple's. The wonders of just using the colours, level of transparancy, and background colour....

URL of my Japanese main blog

2009-02-20T20:11:00.002+08:00

If you had seen the URL to my japanese blog, you would notice either a long-ish alpha-numeral adress (xn--n8jos8fqkx000ci6n) or the name in Japanese (虹を追いかけて), depending on your settings. By default, it would display the former.

In Internet Explorer version 7 or latter, you would notice an icon in the URL bar like the left screenshot and may or may not display the proper URL. Same applies to browsers like Safari or Crome, but without that notification icon, though which it would display depends on your computer/browser settings.

The older URL (chasing-after-rainbows) now redirects to the English version (the1iam), which, among the 2 language versions, I would updated more frequently. There are links from there that would lead to the japanese version.

I have created these tinyurl links pointing to the same site for convience:

http://tinyurl.com/6b4aww
http://tinyurl.com/dffbs2

10,000 hits reached

2009-02-15T08:23:00.003+08:00

Since I had put up the visitor counter across all my blogs at blogspot (except the 2 hidden from my profile) since December 2008, the numbers has hit ten thousand.

I know it's not really accurate as people would view other posts, web bots taking screenshots or finding pharses that would appear in the search results, and some would re-visit the page. Then again, my blogs has been around for many times longer than when I put up some form of knowing the numbers of people visiting.

The counter you see above it displays current number of visitors. If you click on it, you would see the pages that are being viewed and a map of where all my visitors where it is generally spread around the world. If you played around with the map, you would notice that the large majority of visitors are from Japan. This is probably largely because entering "とらドラ歌詞" (Toradora song lyrics) in Google search, would have the post of one of my blogs appearing at the very top in 1st place out of the 242,000 possible results. The screenshot below is proof:

So thank you for visiting my blog.

progress of v0061 & what is going on now

2009-02-06T22:49:00.004+08:00

It has been some days since I last release a vector, but there are a lot of things I should be doing now. Doing vector is like a brain drain than writing a story as I have to figure out how to colour a region. The craziest thing I have done is v0046, because I spent a lot of time just doing the leaves.

How long it takes me to complete a vector varies from less than a day (sometimes 3 in 24 hours), to a week, depending on the complexity/detail. But with life-changing events taking place for the next 2 months, it looks like I have to slow down the pace I am doing, which means even longer time than before. I may, however, continue on with writing my original stories when I feel like it, which I find quite enjoyable.

Changes made

2009-02-02T23:27:00.002+08:00

I don't really remember what changes were made since the last update, but here's some of them:

Background image changed
Background of post, sidebar, and top navigation bar has been changed to semi-transparent. This is made possible by just replacing the white with a partially transparent white PNG image.
Colours of the side navigation menu of the Japanese version of the main blog and the drawings blog has been changed to red/pink.
Added "Tw Cent MT" as the first font to load on the technology blog.
To avoid confusion or misunderstanding in the search results, (TVサイズ)/(TV-size) next to the song title has been relocated to below the name of the singer(s) as "赤：TVサイズ"/"Red: TV-size" on the anime blogs.
Colours and table formatting for "Friends Blogs" (on both English and Japanese Versions) has been changed. Apparently, the outer border looks different on different browsers.
Some time ago, I have (quietly) lifted the restriction of the posts having to be verified by me before the comments appear. However, I am still notified if someone posts at my blog.
Format for the signature on my vectors has changed from
高橋はるか
2009年2月2日（月）
nijitoki.blogspot.com
to
高橋はるか・2009年2月2日・nijitoki.blogspot.com
Fonts and colours are unchanged. Notice the omission of the day of the week. The order may be change to fit the positioning. By default it would appear at the bottom right (bottom left for the older version). Older vectors will not be affected unless I have decided to make changes.
I have disabled auto-play of the music player on the English anime blog. Japanese version had already done so earlier.
If you haven't noticed, my third story on my main blog has "to be continued in part X" on the right instead of the usual left. Images are also omitted. Speaking of which, I do have plans to insert parts in between as a separate part. You would know if you see Part X.Y in the title or "to be continued/continued from part X.Y" somewhere in the middle of Part X.
Songs has been added to the playlist. If you are wondering what number the new toradora opening & ending songs are, it's 489 and 490. (OP/ED for the earlier ones are 437 & 436) 491 and 487 are white album op/ed songs.
"Anime watch list" on my other blogs are updated. I hadn't changed since the last few episodes of Autumn 2008 anime and now in the first few of Winter 2009 ones.

Change of theme and re-organizing posts

2009-01-18T12:22:00.002+08:00

On the drawings blog, I have applied the layout that you had seen on the layout testing blog. I have fixed some links that point to the old URL links that are now broken.

As for the posts, I have changed the date stamp of the posts to reflect the date and (if available) time they are created. Due to this, dates at the post title are now removed as they are now redundant. Links to those posts, however, remains unchanged. For example, posts (up to v0054) such as v0051 was originally dated on 2 January 2009, but since the drawing was first completed earlier, on 30 December 2008, the date has been changed accordingly. In the URL, however, it's still:

http://nijitoki.blogspot.com/2009/01/v0050-20081230-30-december-2008.html

The parts in bold are the ones that should have changed. I could have created a new one to replace this, but it may get confusing in the progress and posts linking to it could become broken.

Changes on the way my drawings are displayed

2009-01-15T12:17:00.002+08:00

Seeing that my drawings are getting even more messier as they increase, I have decided to remove most of the thumbnails of my drawings that appear at the very bottom of my main and anime blogs of both language versions. In the case of the japanese anime blog, it's at the bottom of the sidebar. Now, only the best and the most recent ones are displayed. The large image featuring the most recent vector remains unchanged.

I have, however, created a smillar one at the drawings blog that still display all the drawings I made since July 2008 and some from earlier, on top of the fact that the blog itself are of my drawings. The code for it was copied over from the main English blog before making the changes, and the positioning has been modified to look smillar to the japanese anime blog. Since it's copied from there, you would be able to see my comments for it if you hover over the image for a while.

Speaking of the drawings blog, I am planning to change the layout theme there as the current one looked rather plain. Previously, I wanted to apply it to the main blog instead, but I found the existing layout too nice to change (apart from the title image).

blog for testing layouts created

2009-01-13T15:50:00.003+08:00

I have created a new blog dedicated just to accommodate testing of layouts. Previously, this would happen on the technology blog, but that would also mean interfering on the seriousness of it and, at times, fanciful colours, fonts and images would make it harder to read.

What you are seeing now is the result of using the same code as what I use on my main blog around April-August of last year.

Right now, I'm modifying it to use it there for the Spring season starting from around March/April. Why I'm doing this is that I normally change the layout every 3 months, according to the seasons since the latter part of summer (around September). During the recent few months however, I noticed that the number of viewers has increased. The current main blog layout is getting buggy with that quote icon appearing on an external link which would have a preview if hovered over. Also, there is also a persistent problem of having a pop-up (or under) when entering, which I can't seem to find it with all that lengthy code that makes up this blog (not counting posts and contents of visible widgets). I don't know how it happened, but it didn't appear on any of my other blogs.

I will be adding the current version of the navigation menu as part of the blog layout. I know that it's redundant to the widget version. Speaking of widgets, I won't be adding the contents except the ones that comes with the layout since they are very vulnerable to being deleted in the process. So, in order to visit my other blogs, you either have to enter the URL, click on links via my profile, or as part of the layout and hope that the link is not outdated.

I also plan to change the font to outside the "Arial, Terbuchet MS, Times New Roman, Tahoma, Verdana" font (typeface) range. I also plan to change the English Anime blog layout, smillar to the Japanese version. Previously, the latter was supposed to had the layout of the former, but due to numerous problems, I replaced it with a modified version of the main blog layout.

Where my search box would lead you to now

2008-12-31T22:24:00.003+08:00

How this thing is works is like a mystery when I first put them on my blogs about half a year ago. I noticed that people had used it, but less than 1% of them had clicked on it as it works the same way as the most popular search engine. People were expecting things relating to my blogs, but they saw things from all over the web instead.

Just a while ago, I went to the search settings and saw this option highlighted in red below:

It was on "The entire web" option... no wonder. I entered the list of site people might be searching for below and it works! Reason why I didn't notice this earlier was that I never used it myself! :P

PS. This post wasn't planned, so this is my actual final post for 2008. The previous was the Autumn 2008 review on my main blog.

Japanese Main Blog URL changed

2008-12-16T11:20:00.002+08:00

The URL for the main blog in Japanese has been changed as follows

Old: http://chasing-after-rainbows.blogspot.com

New: http://虹を追いかけて.blogspot.com

Alternatively, you can use http://xn--n8jos8fqkx000ci6n.blogspot.com or http://tinyurl.com/6b4aww to go to the website. The old URL will now redirect you to the English version.

rejected version of "Alternate Dimension (Part 15)"

2008-12-12T19:24:00.003+08:00

I was going to finalize part 15 of this story and post it today, but I found it unsuitable to post as the finalize version. Here is the storyline that was rejected in quotes below:

(continued from part 14)

With the events that happened during the summer break behind us, I found myself at the little known scientific research & development building at the college area of the school campus. I don't know how long ago that was, but I'm wearing the winter uniform already. Saeko had went to the music club for practise, so I'm now all alone by myself in the testing room, lying down on the soft floor, filled with electrical devices of some sort. I don't know why I'm here, how I got here, or what to do with these devices. There appears to be a mirror on one side of the wall, but I strongly suspect that it is a one-way window with someone watching me on the other side.

I'm seem to be somewhat more energetic than what I thought I normally was. At one end, there is what seemed like some kind of a cord plugged into a computer at one end of the room. I looked down and I seem to be sitting on it. I got up, but to my horror, I found out that the wire was plugged into me, somewhere through my bottom. I tried to unplug it at either end, but no matter how hard I tried, it won't event budge. Jumping around the room like crazy doesn't help either as the computer I'm connected to doesn't even budge, although strangely, I was able to carry it around without difficulty. Did someone, with this, program me in such a way that anyone but myself would be able to remove this? The idea of me being programmed is scary.

Giving up, I went there and check if there's anything on it. Let's see... Oh! I see a drive that goes into several petabytes! And there doesn't seem to have a limit on it! But what drive is that, and why is it so big? Most of the stuff I see in there looked awfully familiar, but not sure where I saw it... Hey, my favourite music by The Clip Files is there! Let's play it!

.........

The music player appears to be playing the song as I can tell from the visualization, but I heard nothing. I unmuted the audio and then increased the volume. Next thing I knew, the song came out of my mouth in my voice, as though I was singing that song. Musical instruments were completely absent, but if there are multiple voices saying different things at the same time, I would also hear those multiple voices at the same time too, but in my voice. I can't stop singing until the song ends or when I hit the stop/pause button. What was that?

At that moment, I heard myself in a monotonous voice (unlike when I was "singing" just now) saying "as Mamiko utters to herself". I find that part rather annoying, why can't I get rid of it?! ("as Mamiko shouted in frustration"). Gaaaa!!!!!

After calming down, I checked what else is on there. What's this "adjust settings"? Let's see... change language to this. それに…　あれ？　私はなにをお話？この言語はなに？なぜこの言語は私に知ってるの？あぁー！もどて！もどって！ Hmm? Oh, I didn't know changing the language would affect the language I speak in. Ha ha. Video capture shows exactly what I'm seeing, judging by infinite tunnel I see on the screen. Oh look, I see a recently created file in this very large drive. Let's move to another drive!

I found myself sitting at the computer in some room. What was I doing earlier? Let's hit the undo button and see what happens.

Woah, I didn't know moving that file would make me forget what I was doing earlier. I checked myself, it seems I am wearing something underneath this unifrom. Oh, it that "swimsuit" I was forced to wear, and my bottom is where on my body this cable is connected to, though it looked as though it was pierced through. I want to remove it because I would easily slip off when I try to sit down. I tried to remove it, but can't. Even stabbing or shooting myself would leave the knife or bullet bouncing off without a scratch. Not even a grenade exploding in my hands can harm myself. Wahahahaha! Even restraining or injecting stuff to me doesn't work! I then run around like crazy all over the room, though I can't go far because of the stupid thin cable attached to me that I can't remove.

Next thing I knew, I was knocked out. I find that a relief as I was going crazy.

Ever since my clone reappeared after she went missing during the summer vacation, she has been behaving rather strangely, sometimes to the point that it even scares me. Her eyes however, tells me that she's pleading me for help as she can't control her body. I wonder if that colleague of mine intentionally did something to make her go crazy, or did something wrong happened?

I find it hard to restrain her as she keep messing up the house like an animal and easily break stuff around the house. However, the easiest way was to just connect any kind of plug, string, pin or wire onto any part of the "swimsuit" she's wearing (but can't remove). That way, she can't remove the ends of the wire, and devices it's attached to (as long it's not hanging in the air after doing so), herself and the distance she can move is restricted to how short the wire is.

The person in charge of the place I was cloned has been away for a long time as he's involved in something with the world health organization at one of the poorest countries in the world. Sounds like he's doing a good cause there by helping the poor there with their health problems.

I typed up to there before I gave up. I know I it's long and spent a lot of time writing this, but I find it too sexually suggestive and doesn't really go anywhere storyline-wise. I tried to fix it by putting the alternative point of view below that horizontal bar (above the image in the middle), but it doesn't really help. I could put up the corrected version, but I'm thinking of a dramatic change to the storyline or starting another (3rd) story from scratch.

Excuse me while I do the v0045 vector.

Outlines of vectors to be added

2008-12-11T02:51:00.002+08:00

Outlines of my vectors starting from v0001 will appear in the drawings blog quite soon. Exceptions are v0014, where there are no outlines at all, and v0007 to v0010, which are rejected.

When doing the ones before v0014, I would have to separate the outline from the colour by placing it in a separate layer. As the way I do the vectoring in those are more complex than recent ones, it's quite hard and time-consuming to make changes.

Technology blog layout changed

2008-12-04T20:23:00.002+08:00

(Note: Image is 0.99MB)

I have changed the blog layout of my technology blog to what you see in the picture. The code used to make this is the same as all my other blogs, but with several changes to the code here and there.

The font used you see is "Myriad Pro", which is also used on some versions of iPod and used as Apple Inc.'s corporate font. This font is included with recent versions of Adobe Reader, but it's not installed on the PC. To do so go to a directory like "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Resource\Font\MyriadPro-Regular.otf" and copy it to "C:\Windows\Fonts". "Segoe UI" works fine too.

I'm not yet done with this yet as you can see the header from the English version of my Anime blog in the middle of the screenshot. Other than that, the blog does look nice.

English main blog theme changed (Nov 2008)

2008-11-10T21:04:00.003+08:00

I have changed (again) the theme of my main English-language blog from Autumn to Winter. Reason why I'm doing it early is that I would foresee not having the time to do so when the time comes. Right now, I have changed mostly everything except the header image and blog title & description, since I have yet to decide on a suitable image and can't change the colour of the text there until I have chosen the image beneath it.

22:32 edit: I have found the images for the banner. The concept you see now is not new: it was used back in April this year, but now I know how to easily position the images that are not positioned to the left.

New top navigation menu

2008-11-04T22:04:00.002+08:00

I have redone the top navigation bar of the Japanese-language version of my main blog a while ago. Even though it looks complete, I still need to check for alignment problems on Trident and WebKit-based browsers. Speaking of Trident-based browsers, I won't be fixing problems that only appears in IE6 as that is, by today's standards, outdated.

As the links in the new navigation menu are carried over from the earlier version, I need to remove some codes (eg. background image) in order to fit in nicely. Currently, the links are aligned towards the left. I want it to be at the center. The search box has been moved from the other navigation menu and on to the new one.

I'm thinking of applying this to the English-language version too, but seeing that I am going to change the current autumn theme to winter somewhere between the end of this month and the beginning of the next, maybe later.

progress of vector v0029

2008-11-02T00:46:00.003+08:00

I started doing this on the night of 30 October and normally be able to complete it within 24-48 hours from the starting time.

What is taking it longer than usual is that, apart from distractions not relating to this, is that you may have noticed that the outline closely matches the nearby colour region instead. On my earlier vectors, I would use the default black (#000000) instead for the outline. But that was until I discovered this feature, along with the blurring effect. I should get around to complete this soon. When it's ready, it should appear at the "My Drawings"/"自作絵" sections of my main and anime blogs, along with a post on the drawings blog, with a resolution much larger than what you see here..

Speaking of blurring, you might have noticed that v0022 had been edited closer to the source image with the pink shadow effect. I wanted to do that effect via radical gradient, but it did not turn out well. So I had instead used a 25% transparent pink as the background instead until I fixed it. Another is the shadow part of v0011: It didn't look nice on shapes with angular lines and flat colours overlapping each other. The solution was to blur it.

You might have also notice in both cases that a white non-transparent, background has been used instead of a totally (or semi) transparent one. It's not noticeable if the colour underneath it is white, but when placed against black or orange background, it wouldn't look nice.

some minor changes

2008-10-28T22:49:00.003+08:00

I have change the layout of the drawings blog to a version that I had used back in August or earlier (based on the fact that my latest drawing when I retrieved it was at v0013) on my main blog. Previous layout for the drawings blog was "Minimalism", one of the default Blogger XML layouts. Do note, however, that the current one uses the older classic template.

With winter coming around the corner, about a month away (December), I have yet to decide to use a new layout or just modify the existing one. The latter looks messy at the current state, but the former is difficult to edit from the "Fonts & Colors" layout settings, though that was what the latter was at the beginning.

I have also edited the Japanese-language version of my main blog. I have reduced the sidebar header font size, eliminated the weird empty spacing surrounding that and the sidebar contents. Overall width of post has been reduced from 100% to 96% (at about the same time I did the layout fix) and now 80%. This is so that more of the background can be seen.

anime blog layout replaced

2008-10-21T21:18:00.002+08:00

As mentioned yesterday, I had problems with the blog layout with the English Anime blog layout. It's based on the layout on my main blog, but has been modified to look like the layout that was replaced.

As a result, the weird empty spaced is removed, the text now flows more nicely. Stuff that didn't get carried over from the old one includes:

background for blog title
imaged-based borders (replaced by CSS of the same colour)
background for blog title and description (as above)
tab-like navigation links
background of the sidebar
sidebar header font, colour, size

Not much noticable difference actually, more of under-the-hood stuff. Might apply this layout on the Japanese version, but looking at the current state, that might not be necessary.

navigation menu updated

2008-10-16T12:29:00.004+08:00

(see also; older ver)

Old:

	プロファイズ・エン・ブログ・アップデット	Profile and Blog Updates
	日本語版 \| 英語版 \| 更新 \| 技術 \| アニメ(日本語・英語) \| ゆかりちゃん
	Japanese \| English \| Updates \| Technology \| Anime (jp/en) \| Yukari-chan

New:


Profile and Blog Updates
日本語版英語版更新技術アニメ(日本語) アニメ(英語) 自作絵ゆかりちゃん	Japanese ver English ver Updates Technology Anime (jpn) Anime (eng) Drawings Yukari-chan

(may look different due to the blog template and CSS codes that may overide the ones used here)

I have updated the navigation menu to what you see above. The older version by itself is based on an even earlier version which, if the width is insufficient, would go onto the next line, whereby distorting the alignment of the menu. Before planning to do the new one, I tried to make the text scroll and make it stop if hovered over on my main blog, but it doesn't look right. Sure it prevents from text from going to the next line unless the break rule (br) tag is used, but it just doesn't look right and in fact, even worse.

On top of that the older one, apart from what was mentioned earlier, faces compatibility issues. For example, a strange empty space appears in IE6 and IE7. For the former, the transparent areas of PNG images becomes white-ish blue instead. This problem does not appear in other browsers.

I tried various background images for the new one at first, but it appeared difficult to read. Then I remembered the style I had used on my anime blog recently and applied that to it (along with references to other sites) to become what you see now.

Minor changes to display of drawings

2008-10-09T12:21:00.004+08:00

Due to the increasing number of vectors done, I would remove pencil drawings that I already have done a vector of in the "My Drawings"/"自作絵" sections of my main and anime blogs. This is mainly because the pencil ones contain outdated/incorrect information and are difficult to change. The vectored ones look better anyway. All are arranged by when it was done, with the most recent one being the first.

To deal with this increase, I have already created a new blog that displays vectored that I had done so far, including the versions when I made it in their original resolutions and what are the images used to make it, including ones that I had rejected. However, unless a vector version is done, pencil drawings will not appear here. Except for v0005, all vectors are in numeral order.

Do note that I may put up a vector suddenly without mentioning about it, though there are some exceptions, but only if I had difficulty doing it or made noticable changes.

IMEEM & Blogger profile theme changed

2008-10-04T12:00:00.004+08:00

The profile at IMEEM has been changed. The previous theme looked plain and had not been changed in a long time.

If you had been there before the change, which has a blue background with an image at the bottom right and a banner with words that I had used on my Japanese main blog, you would be in for a surprise if you were to visit again now.

The new one features a lot of pink and a revamped banner. If you look carefully at the bottom right of that banner, you might be able to see my name and the URL of my English main blog. The display image is now of a schoolgirl on a chair playing the violin.

For the Blogger profile, there are no major changes. Just that I have added the names of recent anime in the interest field. Random question has also been changed.

PS. I noticed that over a thousand people had viewed my profile. The average profile is about 5-10 times less than that...

Re-arranging of photos

2008-09-23T18:51:00.004+08:00

I am doing a massive re-sorting of the photos across all the albums at Facebook as they are increasing and are hard to tell what's inside without looking through it.

The images were previously sorted according to when they were taken (eg. October 2006). Now, I sorting images based on the event or what was in the image.

This can take some time to complete. In the meantime albums may be created/renamed and filled to the maximum (60 photos) to accommodate the unsorted images so that I have lesser albums to look through when sorting.

Note: Some photos may be deleted as I don't want them or are duplicates.

updates to imeem playlist

2008-09-16T22:50:00.002+08:00

Looks like I need to update my IMEEM playlist as I had come across songs I don't like (or liked it when I added it but not later on) when playing the songs randomly. With song count in that playlist currently at 384 (I know, that's a lot), I should go and remove that song as soon I hear it.

For your info, that playlist is featured across my main and anime blogs. However, my KOTOKO playlist seems to be quite popular. So popular that if you were to just type "KOTOKO" in the searchbox there under "Everything" or "Playlists", mine would be the first thing in the results that you would see.

problem fixed somewhat

2008-09-15T13:34:00.002+08:00

As mentioned previously, I have only manage to make the post having the same length across all the browsers I use (IE7, Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.1, Chrome 0.2). I can't seem to get rid of that empty space mentioned without facing positioning problems in Firefox.

I don't know if I should apply this theme to the Japanese version of the anime blog due to problems faced and the fact that this language requires larger-sized fonts, but I have already applied the background images and colours to it and it looks better than previously.

As some of the widgets contain tables of unspecified width or elements like images that are percentage-based (%), the height of area where these widgets takes up varies.

Major Makeover

2008-09-13T22:29:00.001+08:00

(originally posted here)

I spent most of my time today doing a makeover to one of my most neglected blogs. It's based on the "Ocean Mist" template I found somewhere. The HTML code for it is for the Blogger XML version (newer one, where you can move widgets around).

If you were to look at at the above link and the above screenshot, you would notice very little resemblance. That's because I made the images of the template myself and edited the code so that it would fit in nicely. However, it's still not complete, because I can't seem to find the code for the width of the post as I had increased the overall width from 750px to 1000px. Because of that, widgets that are supposed to appear directly below the posts would appear in the empty space between the post and the sidebar on the right. (The area where you see "Yukari Takahashi's network" in the screenshot above) So far, this only happens in Mozilla Firefox.

Because this code involves selecting the "Expend Widget Templates" checkbox, unlike other blogs with the same codebase, existing widgets have to be deleted and have to start over. Of course, you can still copy the widgets code from the old one (with the checkbox enabled), but with such long complicated code, only an expert would bother. The alternative is to copy the HTML code of each individual widget and paste them to somewhere (like notepad) and then put them back after inserting the new layout, but you would have nightmares if you have a very long link list (the non-table version of my "New Anime" list is an example), unless it was entered as "HTML/Javascript" or "Rich Text" in the first place (for the latter, you would need to view it as HTML when copying). Stuff like blog archives and "About Me" can be added easily though.

If you were wondering what the same blog looked before the makeover, here's a screenshot that was taken less than 2 weeks ago:

Yes, it was that terrible. Too much pink/red everywhere. So terrible that I, as one of the authors of that blog, would not even want to look at it. You wouldn't even believe that this screenshot is of the same blog as the one at the top.

I should be doing the same for the Japanese version, but only after trying to fix the problem about the blog posts mentioned above and backing up stuff there.

PS. There also seems to be something wrong with the vector I did yesterday.

change of colour scheme

2008-09-12T00:22:00.004+08:00

(there has been no progress on updating of my old links)

For no particular reason, I have changed the colour scheme of my main blog to match the seasons. I have no plans to do the same for the Japanese version which uses the same layout.

The current one is for Summer (green, blue), which is from July to September, but since summer will be ending in less than a month, the autumn colour scheme (yellow, orange) will be made around 22 September. Winter (early December) and Spring (pink, blue; April) too. I might do the same for Halloween (orange, black ; end of October), Christmas (white, green, red; end of december), and New Year's too (black, white; 3 days before to early January).

I don't know if I should also do a banner for each to match. The current one seem more suitable for winter.

update of links (update 1)

2008-09-08T21:33:00.003+08:00

With due respect to what was mentioned here, I have changed the URLs linking to here and the Japanese version of my anime blog
at all the posts that was posted at where I had changed the URL of, including one of my earliest post.

This would also mean that the sites mentioned at a post linked from all of my drawings that I had put up would also change. To know about some history about what were the URLs used across all my blogs, please refer to this post. With this, I am now left with 323 posts to look through, down from 435.

Links to other places like YouTube or Friendster are unchanged unless it was mentioned as the nth account.

navigation bar changed

2008-09-07T23:45:00.007+08:00

Old:

	ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ（英語版） Neverending New Beginnings (English Version)
	日本語版 \| 英語版 \| プロフィルとブログの更新 \| 技術 \| Anime (日本語・English) \| ゆかりちゃん

New:

	ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ（英語版）	Neverending New Beginnings (English Version)
	日本語版 \| 英語版 \| 更新 \| 技術 \| アニメ(日本語・英語) \| ゆかりちゃん
	Japanese \| English \| Updates \| Technology \| Anime (jp/en) \| Yukari-chan

Note:May look different from actual ones due to the border that came with the blog template layout that is applied only to images in posts, and the availability of specified fonts installed.

As you might have noticed, I have changed the appearance of the navigation bar across all my blogs. (except for the English Anime blog, which will happen when I do a major makeover of both of the anime blogs: they still look ugly despite the 2-3 layout changes) This one looks a lot better than the older version.

The changes are to relocate it to the area between the blog header and the posts instead of the very top of the blog (even above the blogger's navigation bar). Since it's already a table, I would just change the background from some kind of pink (#FFEEF4) to some kind of orange (#FFEFE2). Colours for the names of the blog (based on the original name and may not reflect the name you see in the title bar) remain unchanged, though I did notice that I had forgotten to include the # sign. Size of the image in the navigation menu has been changed from 50px to 80px. Links in English are added. If you were to hover over a link, a tooltip showing the full description would appear in the language you were hovering over.

As the colours for the links area varies with each blog (black, green, blue, etc.), the background for that area has been changed to white. The colour for non-links there has been changed to closely match the link colours but still distinguishable from links. Under the old colour scheme, the colours would look like a terrible mismatch if the colour of the link was not pink. Also, the fonts used in it (Meiryo, MS PGothic & Sans-Serif) are standardized throughout. I would like to put in some Mac OS X and Linux fonts, but I don't know what the fonts are and getting to use those OSes on a regular basis are are like next to nil.

Due to the length of the title for some of the blogs, the font size varies from long names like "ネヴァエンディング・ニュー・ビギニンッズ（英語版）" at 2px to short ones like "Injuration" at 3/4px to make sure it doesn't go to the next line at the size I view it at (full screen @ 1280*800). Same applies for the links.

I am also thinking of standardizing the image in the navigation menu to what you currently see at the english version of my main blog.

changed layouts

2008-09-06T21:21:00.002+08:00

The layout of the main blog English and Japanese version has been changed. The new layout features a 3 column layout. The former layout at the japanese version would be used for the anime blogs. The new layout is compatible with Blogger's XML (newer) layout format. This would make things easier to update.

Due to the space it takes up, if you are viewing the blog at resolutions smaller than the width of 1280px (1280*720, 1280*800, 1280*1024), widgets may be cut off and you may find the text next to the images going to the next line after just a few words. Maybe I should reduce the size of the images...

On the English blog, you might have noticed that I have added the new "People following this blog". Since it's at the experimental stage, it's not available on all blogs, including my other blogs.

redesigning of the anime blogs

2008-09-05T20:27:00.002+08:00

Even though I had made changes to the anime blogs around the same time as the time I change the urls of some blogs, just last month. The layout actually looks ugly and I don't have the motivation to bother posting it. It's time for a major makeover! And again, I will be using one of the default (non-classic) blogger layout like what I have done before for easy organization and modification. (To view a sample that looks nice, go to my main japanese-language blog).

I may also try to make it look like the blogs hosted at Wordpress like what you see here in terms of the fonts, colours, and clean layout. However, the one here is using the classic coding and I have no idea how to create the modern blogger edition as I can't make heads or tails as to what to do other than codes for the fonts and backgrounds (sometimes, positioning of layout elements too). On top of that, if there are errors or omissions in the code that would not make it appear correctly, I wouldn't be able to save it and the error message does not explain how to correct it other than a general explenation.

upload of photos

2008-09-01T01:24:00.004+08:00

I have recently uploaded images that I have taken between November 2007 to January 2008 (2007/09-2008/01) and September 2005 to December 2005 (2005/10-2005/12). Images that are taken in between have already been uploaded between January and July this year (2008/01-2008/07). The ones taken in October 2007 (2007/10), however, are not yet uploaded due to the massive amount of photos and the 60 photo per album limit at Facebook.

More images will be added later in the reverse order from September 2005 (2005/09) until October 2003 (2003/10) before moving on to February 2008 (or October 2007) onwards until the month before the month I upload it at. (eg. now is September. I would uploaded images up to August) Some months may be skipped as either no photos were taken or too few were taken and had been merged with the neighboring months.

All of these photos are to replace the ones currently appearing at Friendster and to compliment the ones at my Windows Live Spaces blog photo gallery (what a mouthful name).

reducing size of tables mystery solved

2008-08-30T00:40:00.004+08:00

I have figured out on how to reduce the font size for tables. It has been bothering me when editing my main blog where it would appear correctly in the preview, but not on the actual one even after saving the changes as though I never entered it. In case you were wondering what exactly, it's "Anime watch list", "New anime" and "NewType Anime Rankings (June 2008)".

At first, it was something like:

[span style="font-size:80%;"][table]..........[/table][/span]

But it worked properly when I changed that to just:

[table style="font-size:80%;"]..........[/table]

(due to formatting issues, the regular angular brackets had to be replaced with square brackets)

Background for main english blog

2008-08-26T20:51:00.002+08:00

After remembering the codes on how to insert my background and not have them tiled from the top-left corner, I am faced with a problem on what image to place there.

I have about 37000 images that add up to 12.2GB, not counting the ones I have already burned to DVD discs, but finding the one out of that many is so difficult that I would only bother with the recent ones (unless I can't find good ones there). I do try to delete the lower res if higher res are available, but I sort them if the higher res version exceeds 3MB. Sometimes, I need to crop or resize images, but since they are save elsewhere, those are not reflected in the above figures. When saving, the option to enter tags for images in Windows Vista seems to be missing.

I had put up a full sized background before, but this would cause people with mobile devices or slow connection take some time to load. Nice images that would fill up a 1280*800 screen without exceeding 200KB is quite rare.

With the current layout, I think that no background image with a colour that matches the theme would be best, though I would see images that would only use a corner of the screen, preferably with a transparent background.

...

2008-08-26T20:09:00.004+08:00

The reason being that I rarely check my message inbox at Friendster, was that I keep receiving pointless messages faster than I can read them that genuine messages got mixed with them. On top of that, I have moved on to Facebook and my blogs that I hardly even log into it, including my main account there.

Anyways, I received this message from a Canadian guy in Japan who is about 15 years older than me. It's made me sad...

Title: _____ has sent you a smile
Message: _____ wants to brighten your day with a smile. Check out _____'s profile and send a reply.
A message from _____:
At first I was going to say: great photos!! And: You're a great photographer.
But as I looked through them, I realized: you didn't take these photos yourself; you just stole them from the Internet. I was very disappointed.
You're one of those: ganbare Nippon! / Utsukushi Nippon! types. And you lack morals that we have in the West. If you look at my photos; all of them I took myself.
Did you ask permission to use other people's images?
People like you make Japan ugly. Utsukushikunai!

Hmm, I kind of was expecting this kind of message, and it could reflect what other people who viewed that profile but didn't say anything. And what the hell does he know about me? So, to not make myself demoralized further, I'm going to not think about it and ignore this joker, but will remove images from where he might have see it when I feel like it. Those images will be at the photo albums in Facebook and are sorted by the month they were taken. In the meantime, some albums at friendster will be made private.

URL changes

2008-08-18T13:10:00.002+08:00

Seeing that I am having trouble remembering the URLs of "Profiles and Blogs Updates" (updates regarding all my blogs and profiles, mostly here at blogger) and "Neverending New Beginnings" (English version of my anime blog), I have already changed the URLs of those blogs.

The changes are as follows:

Profile updates:
http://yukarifujimi.blogspot.com/ -----> http://the1iam-updates.blogspot.com/

Anime (English version):
http://fujimiyayuki.blogspot.com/ -----> http://asuna888-en.blogspot.com/

URLs for other blogs remain unchanged. The navigation bar that appears at the top has been updated accordingly. Old posts may still point to the old URLs and may not be updated.

dropping compatibility with mobile devices

2008-08-17T14:02:00.003+08:00

Seeing that I was unable to make my blogs mobile-friendly (eg. mobile phone, portable game consoles) at the current state due to the multimedia-heavy nature of my blogs, I don't see the point of trying to optimize for them.

However, I do try to support people who can't install external plugins like flash and the following internet browsers:

Internet Explorer 6 for Windows ME
Internet Explorer 6 SP2 for Windows XP SP2
Internet Explorer 7 for Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista SP1
Safari 3.1 for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems
Firefox 2.5 for Windows ME
Firefox 3.0 for Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista SP1 and various Linux distributions

(the ones in bold are the ones I use frequently while italics are rarely used, but should appear correctly)

The following resolutions are also supported (the ones in bold are the resolution that I would normally optimize it for):

800*600 (4:3)
1024*768 (4:3)
1280*720 (16:9)
1280*800 (16:10)
1280*1024 (5:4)
1600*1200 (4:3)
1920*1080 (16:9)

In addition, I would be resizing the posts that appear on the main page to medium from small. Images that are hosted outside Blogger/Picassa remain unchanged.

layout changes

2008-08-16T12:30:00.003+08:00

The layout for this blog has been changed to that previously used on my main English blog, which has now changed to a newer layout that I had been working on lately.

The main reason for the change on the main blog was that the old layout got quite messy.
On this layout, the old one had to go due to formatting problems that made it hard to read.

When the new layout was made, the Technology blog was used as I had to see what elements are to keep and modify on the main blog at the same time.

I do have plans to do the same to the Japanese version, the Anime blogs (both), but I don't plan on doing that now...

Note: The title banner and links that was at the top in the old layout has been moved to the bottom, though there is already an all-in-one drop-down list at the top containing all the links. It's colour coded (as mentioned here) and categorized so as to easily find the link without cluttering the rest of the blog.

Comment moderation

2008-08-13T19:42:00.003+08:00

I have now enabled comment moderation for all of my blogs. Previously, only this blog and my main English language blog had it enabled. However, anyone can post a comment.

This means that anyone who posts comments of posts on my blogs would have to wait for the authors of the blog to approve (or reject) the comment. The only exception is myself and in the case of the Anime blogs, Yukari too.

The layout of the technology blog has been changed. This is one of the few blogs where I would test new layouts on in the current blogger format. For classic ones however, I can just do it on any blog, especially on the blog I want to apply the layout to. However, I only use it if I just want a text-only blog or base on website layouts I had visited to and make some changes to remove/modify stuff that would work at the site I copied from. Nowadays, I don't even use the classic layout despite most of my friends still do. The layouts you see on my blogs are heavily modified versions of the default layouts of the current blogger layout. (I still leave the credits of the layout I modified from in it intact by the way.)

making some changes

2008-08-12T06:27:00.002+08:00

Realizing on how large the file size the images are on my main blog, with the blog title image alone taking up around 500kb, I don't think it would be practical if it would to view it on a portable device as by the fact that, on my PSP internet browser, the chase keeps running out of memory despite the memory conservation turned on. On my prepaid mobile phone the amount zoomed from 1120 to 8 in a short time.

As a rough guide, the image you see at the bottom corner of my blogs, would fit on the PSP screen nicely. I also started by replacing the memory-hungry image and temporarily put up an image. Changes to the Japanese version would take place when the English version is done.

Changes to colour theme

2008-08-09T01:27:00.003+08:00

I have changed the colour theme for both the English and Japanese versions of my main blogs.

Both: Created links to my other blogs above Blogger's navigation bar. Currently viewing blog would have the name in English instead of Japanese and would not have any links for it. This replaces the earlier link lists (except "More profiles and blogs"). The title immediately below the navigation bar would have the links removed (replaced by the above), image resized and changed to the icon you had already seen next to the address bar (IE7, Firefox & Safari only) instead of the standard one.
All of this changes may apply to the other blogs.

English version: The colour theme has been changed to various shades of pink/red from the previous maroon/white/black. The sidebar and post titles remains largely unchanged as there wouldn't be much of a difference if I had. Background and text colour of some of the 3rd party widgets (like the music player) are changed to match the new theme.

Japanese version: Colour theme has been changed from maroon/white/black (same as the above) to various shades of blue/cyan. Colours for 3rd party apps (except for like the chatbox which is shared with other blogs that has themes with pink/red/white) are also changed to match the theme.

Known problems: The new links at the top faces difficult-to-see colours due to the colours used for links throughout that blog. (I don't want to use #fffffff (white) or #000000 (black) at all) It's hard to find a colour that is close to the theme and still be able to see it with different background colours.

Made slight changes to profile layout

2008-07-20T02:05:00.002+08:00

I have upgraded the layout of the Japanese version to the newer Blogger layout to match the English version. On top of that, I have removed the background image of the post and sidebar widget and replaced it with a solid colour. The font size of the header has increased (even larger for the Japanese version) and has been un-bold. Replacing the RSS link is a smilar one currently only found on Blogger Draft. Alternatively, you can also lookout for the RSS logo that appears in your browser (it's normally absent or greyed-out if there are none).

The HTML of the layout had to be modified from one of the original Blogger layouts (Sand Dollar). Examples include changing of colours, adding background images, adding of the list of fonts used for this blog (like Segore UI) and creating new colour allocation areas that wasn't included in the original.

I had created a Malay language version, but deleted shortly afterwards. My command in that language is very poor compared to other languages and I want to replace what I have known about it with Japanese and English. The freakingly long sentences like "Pintu Kechemasan" (Emergency Exit) and compare it with just "非常口" in Japanese. I just don't want to blog in a language that I want to forget.

Ancient website front page updated

2008-07-17T00:48:00.003+08:00

I have made some changes to the index page of my website that predates my earliest blog post (here actually) by several years.

increased the width of the page from 800px to 1000px.
added image background
rearrangement of page elements
added links to my blogs
modified info at the bottom
deleted links to Neopets pages and pkmn.co.uk

I currently have no plans to make changes to the other pages. However, I am thinking of putting up something relating to anime that I had watched since 2006. I'm going to use a HTML template from "somewhere" instead of the outdated and user-unfriendly page editor that came with it.

As the capacity has a total of 15MB (compared with todays 1GB), images are mostly to be hosted off-site like photobucket.

Of course, I can't gurantee that I would actually do that with my time commitments to other things.

myspace updates

2008-07-12T11:56:00.003+08:00

I'm currently making some changes at MySpace as I haven't been logging into it since February (5 months ago).

For now, I shall only change the display image, anime watch list, and maybe the background image too (the ones you see now are either unchanged for months or are previously used elsewhere). Other changes will come sometime after MySpace have done their major revamp.

Constructing a new blog

2008-07-03T01:15:00.003+08:00

Technically, it's not a new blog. It replaces "Archives of the School Papers". No point letting it rot but create a new one from scratch.

The current template is of the classic type previously used here, so to modify stuff, I have to go to the lengthy HTML layout. I currently have no clear idea on how the blog will turn out though.

Unlike the English and Japanese anime blogs (or Yukari's), the blog's post will not have any direct translation of what appears on the main blog (and vice versa) which will appear randomly. I don't want to be preassured on doing both to the point that I don't post anything at all.

As the URL of that blog will most probably change somewhere along the way, I shall not bother linking to it here. Just look out for the Japanese name of this blog listed in my blogger profile or click on the old link under the old name and hope it's still there.

Condition of my PCs

2008-06-13T06:25:00.001+08:00

Note: This post was originally on my main blog but was moved to here 6 hours after posting as it was unsutable.

Brief summary: My main PC is getting closer to being unusable

Detailed summary: My 2002-era desktop computer seems to be failing as it has lately been making a lot of noise from the processor fan and primary hard disk drive. Also, the on board local area network port has malfunctioned and the only way to get on the network is via the universal serial bus port adapter. (Unfortunately, this also means that the maximum transfer speed is 12Mb/s instead of the intended 100Mb/s due to the USB2.0 limitations) Installing Linux or using another hard disk is not an option as a prompt message appeared saying that files needed to run Windows XP are missing and won't even allow me to boot from the CD. Due to the lack of space and non-standard AT-X power casing, placing it on another casing is out of the question, and I can't put primary or secondary slave drives.

Strangely enough, I was able to install Windows XP SP2 on a PC that came pre-installed with Windows 95 and installed a faster CD reader (that had been replaced by a DVD burner on a PC mentioned earlier) and several larger capacity hard disk drive (14 & 32 GB) on top of the existing one (4GB). I had also installed a sound card and a LAN card (10Mb/s instead of 100Mb/s sadly) too as it did not come with them. Mouse that uses a ball to detect movement, keyboard and display from that era are also use, though it can use the today's wireless USB ones with optical LED/laser detector and LCD display, though not with the DMI connection.

I couldn't think of anything to type at the moment. Sorry for the many technical terms that might have been used. I might also might not be going online until Thursday for various reasons that I might have mentioned earlier. Since I would be not staying at a hotel when overseas, finding an internet connection can be quite tricky, though not so if someone's home network is not secured.